


Once Upon Avenger's Tower

by alrightshezza



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, I hate fix-its yet here we are, No Romance, Time Travel Fix-It
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-23
Updated: 2019-10-08
Packaged: 2020-03-10 03:40:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 33,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18930541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alrightshezza/pseuds/alrightshezza
Summary: Jefferson's hat can only touch worlds with magic. He's not sure if it's a rule or just an annoying quirk, but he wants to test it. He wants to find a world without magic. Steve couldn't care less about any of that. He just wants to find Bucky.





	1. Let's Make a Deal

**Author's Note:**

> First posted on FFnet in 2014. Was told I should put it here as well.  
> Post-Avengers.  
> Pre-Curse.

The White Rabbit is a portal jumper of a special sort. He doesn't need a magic hat like Jefferson's, or a magic bean like that pirate they had rather unfortunately encountered in Neverland. He is his own portal, and flows between the worlds with ease (if you call crawling on your hands and knees in the dirt and then falling for varying amounts of time 'easy'). He never gets trapped, never worries that his magic can be stolen.

But everything has a price.

The lands press against one another in a long line, except when they stack on each other in rows (parallel worlds that contain only slight differences between them, which Jefferson finds fascinating), and the Rabbit has to travel through that line linearly. He can't skip any but the parallel ones, yet he can move backwards or forwards as he wishes. This is his price.

And Jefferson pities him for it. Though the hat has its own set of rules, orderliness is not one of them. He can open any door he chooses as fancy strikes and stroll unhindered to the world it connects to. Order, both he and the hat have decided, is for boring folk.

Still, there is one thing he admits is an upside to the Rabbit's natural skill. He has to travel through _all_ worlds, including those without magic. Jefferson's hat can only touch those _with_ magic.

He's not sure if it's a rule, or just an annoying quirk, but this is one thing he wants to test the hat on. (The only reason Rumplestiltskin hires him in the first place is to find a magic-less world; he would use the Rabbit, but the little ball of fur is impossible to catch if he doesn't want to be caught, and he doesn't, not by the Dark One).

"Come on, Rabbit, give me a hint!" It's a slow day in this far corner of Oz, and Jefferson is between jobs right now. It's the perfect time to go exploring. "A direction to start with would be nice! What does it _feel_ like?"

Something Jefferson had discovered in his first few jaunts around the hat was that each world (and its corresponding door) has a different energy unique to itself. Even the parallel worlds, to some degree, have a singular aura. The Enchanted Forest, for instance, is syrupy-sweet and almost drowning in magic, while Agrabah is sharp and its magic stretched thin. Jefferson often plays like he's dying with his need to know what a world without magic feels like. Is it flat? Bitter, empty, lemon scented?

"I can't help you."

Jefferson throws an arm over his eyes, and groans, "Urgh, Rabbit!"

The furry realm jumper rolls his eyes, and pulls his watch from his blue velvet waistcoat. He's well used to Jefferson's theatrics, and most of the time he tolerates the man because he finds him amusing. But today the clock is ticking forward alarmingly fast.

"You're wasting your time, Hatter," he says in a small but insistent voice.

Jefferson inwardly cringes at the name, more so than the rebuking (he's been getting the same song from the rabbit for years now and he stopped expecting a new tune a long time ago). He hates being called Hatter. It's so impersonal. And he's sure that Rabbit hates being called so just as much, but they don't trust each other enough to give their real names. A few deals and bump-intos here and there aren't enough to distract them from the knowledge that the Rabbit has terrible mental defenses and a low pain tolerance, and that Jefferson is as easily bought as a loaf of bread.

"Now," the Rabbit says, patting Jefferson's knee and picking up the small basket he hadn't noticed Jefferson stealing cookies out of earlier, "I've got six worlds left to jump and I'm late for tea with my cousin. I'd best be off."

Jefferson slouches, shakes his head. The bunny's always late for something and it ticks him off. He prefers to show up to things when it's convenient for him (unless, of course, he's meeting Rumple, and then he's always exactly on time. It's hard to jump worlds when one is a snail. He knows, he's tried) but then again, the hat can take him to any world, any when, and he supposes the other can't do that.

"You're welcome to join us, of course," the Rabbit offers, as a small, perfectly round hole opens up in the dirt in front of them.

"Aw, but the Hare is _weird!_ And he's always throwing things at me." Jefferson shudders. "I'd rather not join your mad tea party, thank you. I'm going to go find myself a land without magic!"

The Rabbit shrugs and bounds off into his hole. The dirt seals up behind him and Jefferson is left alone. He takes his time wandering back through the forest the short way he and the rabbit had walked. It's a cool day, sunny and cloudless, not that he can really tell beneath the thin, unbroken canopy of leaves over his head. The forest is silent, and Jefferson picks his way across uneven, stony ground unhurried and undisturbed. Eventually, he comes upon the lone stone-and-emerald arch draped with ivy that serves as his gateway back to the hat, and steps through.

Cool, dark marble meets his boots as he enters the Realm Room. His footsteps echo up the red silk walls and off the various doors surrounding him. The ones that he can see are only a small portion of the worlds he has access to, and he's been to all of them. He needs to find a new one; one that leads to somewhere magic doesn't exist.

He walks to the centre of the Room and considers for a moment where in the whole of the infinite realms he wants to look today. Somewhere far away from Wonderland, he thinks, as steeped in magic as it is.

Jefferson closes his eyes, sticks his arms out, and spins himself around as he so often sees children doing. His thoughts guide the hat as it searches and when he opens his eyes five doors are spread out around the circular chamber. He stumbles, a bit dizzy, but hurries over to examine one.

It's silver, and shiny, made of metal. There's a thick handle on the left side under painted red script that reads 'caution - geniuses at work.' Thick hinges cover most of the right side, kind of useless in a hat where none of the doors touch the walls, but he supposes they're necessary in whatever world is on the other side. He just hopes they're not there to keep something dangerous inside, and that he isn't walking in the wrong way.

Because, he thinks as he ruffles his hair, he is going through. The land on the other side feels flat and lemon-fragranced, just like he asked for. So, Jefferson grasps the handle, turns it down, and gives the door a good push.

It swings open easily.

**0o0o**

Tony Stark has seen plenty of things since he first became a superhero. Evil family friends, backstabbing secretaries, aliens in New Mexico, glow-y mind controlling spears, aliens in New York…It's gotten his 'weird things' tolerance pretty high. So, when a man in way too much leather and with a little too much eyeliner on comes stumbling into his lab through a locked door, he doesn't give it too much thought.

He's alone except for JARVIS who's watching from both security cameras and the HUD in Tony's helmet. He's got a screwdriver in one hand, a half-finished glove from the latest Iron Man suit on the other, and a sweating glass of Scotch on the table. Metallica throbs from multiple speakers around the room, loud enough (thankfully) that Tony can't hear himself think. He doesn't hear the door open, either.

JARVIS cuts the music off and, startled, Tony glances up. Some handsome weirdo wearing more leather than a cow stands just inside the lab, his hands over his ears and his eyes opened wide. The door slowly closes behind him and Tony can see one of the framed schematics of the first Iron Man suit on the beige wall of the next room before it shuts.

"You have a visitor, sir." JARVIS announces inside the helmet.

"Really?" Tony deadpans. "What have I told you about letting strange men into the Tower, J?"

"Absolutely nothing, sir. We haven't talked about 'stranger danger' since you brought that blonde home in Malibu."

Tony finds he doesn't have an answer to that. He watches as the strange man slowly lowers his hands and looks around curiously until he sees Tony. He stiffens.

"How'd he get in here, JARVIS?"

"Uncertain at this point, sir, but the room he came through was quite empty before he opened the door."

Tony stands up, aims the glove at the fruitcake with the ascot. It's only half put together and isn't much more than a glorified flashlight at this point, but if he's dumb enough to break into Avengers Tower then Tony figures he's not likely to call his bluff.

"Who the Hell are you?" Tony demands out loud, his voice tinny through the helmet.

"Forgive me; there's not usually anyone on the other side when I come through these things." The man turns and glares at the door like it's let him down somehow. Then he looks at Tony and smiles. It's dazzling, and lights his whole face up (though it's kind of a dark, reddish, ominous sort of light, Tony thinks, and decides to classify it as a leer). "I'm Jefferson."

"Charmed. How'd you get in here?" Tony drops the screwdriver, keeps the repulsor glowing, and steps cautiously closer. He hopes there's nothing wrong with JARVIS that this man has made it up a hundred plus floors unhindered. He has just finished re-calibrating the sensors to detect Thor beaming in before the demigod arrives; he was a bit drunk at the time though, maybe he touched something he shouldn't have.

"Through the door," is the cheeky answer. "I'm a portal jumper from another realm. Apologies for dropping into your home unannounced."

Tony lifts the faceplate with a small cue to JARVIS and the man relaxes a little. "Another realm?"

"I'm a peaceful explorer, I promise. I mean no harm." Jefferson holds his jacket open and Tony gets a good look at the black leather pants, red leather vest, and the inside of the brown leather coat. He wonders what possessed the man to make him leave the house wearing all of that. "Look, I've got no weapons."

JARVIS scans him and quietly confirms it. Tony lowers the glove (his arm was starting to hurt anyways). "And you just happened to show up in my Tower…how?"

Jefferson shrugs. "I don't control where the hat opens its doors."

There's a moment of silence as Tony studies the stranger, and then, "Ohh," he cheerily drawls. "You are _high_ as a kite. You need to meet the others! I'm Tony Stark, by the way, on the off chance you don't know whose tower you just broke into."

He waves the man closer and then leads him out of the lab. At the very least, Clint (he'd prefer Natasha but Miss Espionage is halfway around the world right now) can keep an eye on the guy while Tony wheedles out a proper answer and possibly does some blood tests. If he is from another realm, and not just some nut with a leprechaun's blessing of luck, it will show up. And then they can ask the fun questions.

Jefferson hesitates at the elevator, wondering what the purpose of such a tiny, empty room is. But the other just explains that it's a lazy alternative to stairs and that the people he wants to introduce are at least seven floors down.

Tony finally convinces Jefferson to join him and presses the button for the community floor. He's a bit disappointed when the man who doesn't recognize simple technology is only a bit impressed by the doors opening to a different hallway. But then, he supposes, if the guy does open portals in doorways, this would be a familiar cup of tea.

As they step out of the elevator, Jefferson perks up and comments on the opulent décor. It's all the invitation Tony needs to blather on about the richest floor in his green-energy masterpiece of a building. He shows off the gold-framed paintings and the million dollar trinkets sitting open on sculpted pedestals as they pass, boasting as he hasn't had a chance to since Steve's last chewing out. He thinks that maybe he might keep this intruder who keeps switching between asking where the torch sconces are and wondering aloud how Tony came by such an impressive collection. He knows it's just calculated blandishing of course, but it's a nice change from the ingrates he lives with who don't even pretend.

He's about to ask Jefferson about his world when he hears a door opening in front of them. Steve stands in the threshold to let them pass, but he freezes when they do. Tony ignores the soldier, but Jefferson gives him a curious stare as they go by.

"…Bucky?" comes a whisper behind him, and Jefferson turns, curiosity in his expression. He barely ducks the swinging punch that cracks the concrete wall beside them.

"Steve!" Tony shouts, throwing his hands up and stepping forward to fend off another attack.

"Who are you?!" the blond, at least a head taller than either of them, demands. He pushes Tony to the side and drags Jefferson closer by the collar of his leather jacket.

Jefferson doesn't stutter but he definitely flinches. Physical violence has never been his thing. "My name is Jefferson! I'm-"

"Why do you look like him?" Steve gives him a shake, and Jefferson's head snaps back.

"Like who?" he yelps. His neck aches and he's in a new world that he doesn't understand and he's being manhandled for an answer he doesn't have. Some context would be lovely! He tries to pry the other man's hands off his coat but his fingers are as immovable as stone.

"Steve, let him go!" Tony puts a hand on the man's shoulder, holds his gaze when furious blue snaps to stare at him. "This guy's some kind of alien. He's from another world, like Thor. Except when Thor says 'realm' he means 'planet on the other side of the universe,' and when this guy says it I'm pretty sure he means 'other dimension.'"

Steve gives Jefferson a quick look-over before dropping his hands. He shakes them out like they've been burned. Jefferson turns away, keeping Steve in his peripheral version, and flicks his collar back into place. The people in this land are crazy, he thinks. "Who's Thor?"

"Eh," Tony brushes the question away with a wave of his hand, "You might run into him later. Don't worry about it. This," he says, gesturing grandly to the blond, "is Steve Rogers, America's golden boy. Best stick to Captain America until he warms up to you a bit."

Jefferson eyes the Captain warily. "Pleasure," he deadpans, sticking out his hand.

"Likewise." Steve grits his teeth, and shakes just a little too hard, but Jefferson can see the hurt behind his eyes. His tongue itches to ask for the story that put it there.

"Cap, this is-"

"My name's Jefferson," he interrupts, "I'm a portal jumper from the Enchanted Forest." He grins smugly, like it's something to be proud of and not just the load of crazy it sounds like.

Steve glances at Tony, who shrugs and stage-whispers, "He walked through a doorway that JARVIS swears was empty beforehand, so I figured I'd just go with it."

Jefferson purses his lips and straightens his scarf, trying to ignore the two stares aimed his way. Usually he doesn't mind the attention (and he doesn't, really, everything is for show), but while he sort of trusts Tony not to snap him in half, he wonders at what kind of creature Steve Rogers is to punch through rock.

"JARVIS?" Steve isn't quite glaring, but his fists are clenching and opening with irate energy.

"Captain Rogers." The AI's voice is smooth and echoes around the hallway from somewhere in the ceiling.

Jefferson's eyes widen and he looks around delightedly. "You have a genie?"

"Scan him," Steve orders. "I want age, blood-type…planet of origin if you can."

"I've run all of the scans I can, Captain, but the results are incomplete. Something is interfering with my sensors."

"That'll be the magic," Jefferson says lightly.

"Well, what can you tell me?"

"He is approximately 23 years of age. And he is not from Earth."

"Thanks, J, I can take it from here," Tony says. Steve is as good as Clint for what he's about to do.

Tony pulls something small and square out of his pocket. He flips it over, feigning nonchalance, and then grabs the stranger's wrist, turns his hand over, and jabs his finger before he can react.

"Ow! What was _that?"_

"Blood sample." Tony grins. Steve twitches but doesn't argue, and he's relieved. He knows Cap needs answers too much to object to his invasion.

Jefferson looks alarmed and presses a finger over the bleeding pad of his thumb. "I need that back."

"Pff." Tony ignores him, grabs him by the elbow and steers him back in their original direction. He slips the needle into a slot on the wall as they pass. Rogers follows behind them silently.

"It's just a little blood, nothing to worry about. It's not like you can put it back now, anyway."

"It only takes a drop-" to make dark potions. But if they don't know that (because it's impossible to miss the looks Tony gets whenever he mentions magic, and he's desperately hoping he's got the right world even though he knows he hasn't) then he isn't going to clue them in.

"Well, I only took half a drop, so you're fine, Fancypants. C'mon, I want you to meet Bruce." He figures that if JARVIS can't make sense of the man's DNA, maybe the good doctor can. And it hasn't escaped him just how awed Jefferson seems at the technology around him. He looks more out of place than Steve did on the surveillance tapes of his first few weeks, which Tony's only seen because he hacked into SHIELD so many months ago at the start of this whole Avengers business. He wants to put the man in a nice big room full of big shiny computers and leave him stranded, just to see what he'll do.

Jefferson remains silent all the way to the common room, brooding about the blood sample. Steve too, though Tony thinks he's probably brooding about something else. When they get there, the hallway opens up into a circular room bigger than most people's houses, both lengthwise and vertically. A widescreen TV takes up most of the wall to their immediate right, playing some muted, old-school black-and-white movie Tony doesn't recognize. Clint is sleeping, sprawled upside down on an armchair with his hearing aids next to him, his head hanging over the edge, and one foot propped on the back. A couple of other chairs and two couches are scattered around the room, the majority of them facing the television. A small kitchenette is tucked in the back of the room, empty at the moment, but stocked with snacks and all of Tony's favourite kinds of alcohol.

Jefferson is lucky enough to take most of it in _before_ he notices the movie screen. When he does, his eyebrows disappear into his carefully chaotic hair and his black-lined eyes widen.

"It's...like the Queen's mirror." Only bigger, and, rather than holding only a single face, it appears to be a whole host of players running about. He can only imagine what horrible things those people had done to end up trapped in there.

"Hey, why don't you stay here while I get Bruce?" Tony says, pushing Jefferson down onto the nearest couch and shoving a remote at him. "This movie doesn't look…too boring. Here's the volume, don't wake Barton, be back in a sec!" And he's gone.

Flabbergasted, Jefferson examines the thick wand in his hand. It's black and spotted with multi-coloured knobs. He can't remember which one Tony told him to press. He doesn't think the man actually pointed to any of them, just threw the wand at him and ran.

Steve, standing behind the couch, uncrosses his arms to offer grudging help when JARVIS' low voice interrupts.

"Captain Rogers? May I speak to you in private?"

Jefferson glances up sharply and his eyes follow Steve out of the room.

It's unnerving, having a man who looks so much like his best friend sitting in the Tower, and Steve feels his gaze on his back. He ducks into the first empty room he finds and shuts the door behind him.

"What is it, JARVIS?"

"Am I right, sir, in thinking that your discomfort about Mr. Stark's new guest stems from his resemblance to Sgt. James Barnes?"

Steve inhales sharply. "Yeah."

"I have analyzed the blood sample Mr. Stark collected and I can assure you that they are not the same man."

Steve nods to the empty room, knows that JARVIS can 'see' on any of the many monitors he's sure litter the place. He isn't sure whether he feels relieved or not. "Thanks JARVIS."

"If Mr. Jefferson is indeed from another realm, as he originally claimed, it may simply be that-"

"Thank you. JARVIS. Really. I'll be fine." Steve turns around, puts his hand on the doorknob. "I understand that you'll need to tell Stark if he goes looking, but unless he asks, can you…keep that information to yourself?"

"Of course, Captain."

Steve takes two steps out into the hallway before JARVIS adds, "You might want to rescue Mr. Jefferson from Agent Barton, Captain."

Steve quickens his pace, nearly runs the short distance to the common area as he mentally slaps his wrist. He'd left some medieval dandy alone in a room with a sleeping assassin; Clint may not be as trigger-happy as Natasha but he is just as deadly, and they'll be lucky if the stranger is still alive.

He makes it in time to see Barton stick a knife up to the portal jumper's bare throat. The assassin's got a grip on the puffed red ascot, and he's backed the man against the left wall. Jefferson's hands are raised in surrender, but for some reason he doesn't look too afraid. Steve thinks he might be crazy.

Steve moves into Clint's peripheral vision and holds a hand out, palm forward and fingers straight, the ASL sign for stop. "Hawkeye, stand down."

Clint turns just slightly to get a better look at him. Steve nods pointedly at him, and the assassin pushes away, wrenches his purple hearing aids from between the stranger's fingers.

Jefferson scowls and fixes his neckpiece. "I just wanted to look. Is that normally how people in this world greet one another, or am I just special?"

Before Steve can answer, Tony steps into the room with Bruce and drawls, "Well, you did pick the biggest tower full of the world's most paranoid people to drop in on. So, it's kinda your fault."

"I don't pick where the hat opens its doors," Jefferson says again. He sizes up Bruce, and then gives an elegant, if not greatly exaggerated, bow. The man is, after all, the only one in this place who hasn't tried to kill him at first sight. It's a nice change of pace for a poor fellow whose job usually ends up with him running for his life.

There's a beat of silence after he straightens out wherein Bruce's expression turns dazed and he gives a little wave in return. Then Tony shakes his head and spins to his companion and blurts, "That's twice he's said that. Does that sentence actually make sense to anyone? Because if it does, I'm going to feel very put out. _I'm_ supposed to be the genius."

Barton rolls his eyes, and Steve almost joins him.

"So, can anyone tell me why there's some nut with a leather fetish prancing around the tower by himself? Tony?" Clint looks rather accusing and Tony can't help but take that personally.

"Don't give me that look, Katniss. Why would it be my fault? Why is it _always_ my fault? Bruce, tell Featherhead it's not always my fault."

"It is always your fault, Tony." Bruce ignores the billionaire's pout and walks over to the stranger. He extends one hand, keeps the other tucked close and fiddling with the buttons of his dress shirt. "Bruce Banner," he says.

"Jefferson." He considers adding 'at your service,' but the last time he did that, he ended up being assigned a contract killing, and getting out of that with his limbs still attached hadn't been easy.

"So, what was that about hats and doors?" Banner asks, dropping his hand and stepping back. He doesn't offer anyone to sit and Jefferson tries not to take it to heart; they're a little weird in this world.

"I'm a portal jumper," Jefferson says, and he wonders how many more times he'll end up saying it before the day is done. "My portal opens doors to other lands, like this one, Wonderland, the world without colour…" he flaps his hand as he trails off. He doesn't want to explicitly state that his portal is his hat, though he's sure it isn't too hard to figure out with everything he's already said. He's hoping they'll forget about that bit if they ever try to find their way through to it.

"Wonderland?" They look skeptical.

"You've heard of it?"

"Oh yeah," Tony says, "Pretty much every kid on Earth has seen or read or heard of _Alice in Wonderland."_

"Who's Alice?" Jefferson silently weighs the possibility of her being a portal jumper like himself, and wonders if she's still around. Maybe he'll run into her some time, and she can explain this strange world to him over tea like decent folk.

Tony's face scrunches up in a way that silently says, 'never mind, it's not important.' "So how'd you pick our fabulous world-door to bust through uninvited?" He walks over to the couch and flops down on it.

Slowly, everyone follows to claim seats of their own. Barton chooses a chair facing Jefferson, and waits until everyone else is seated before plopping down. Steve sits on the stranger's immediate left; Bruce takes the couch with Tony.

"I was looking for a world without magic," Jefferson admits, lounging in the most comfortable armchair he's ever had the pleasure of resting on, "and yours is the closest I've found."

"What do you mean 'closest?' Magic doesn't exist," Tony says.

Jefferson scoffs and looks between the other men, eyebrows raised. "You must have some magic," he says.

Steve shrugs, Bruce tips his head, and Clint just blinks.

"Magic is for babies. It's fairytale. Not real." Tony is adamant.

"Bu-"

"Stark, don't tell me you haven't you heard the reports about Steven Strange?" Clint speaks over Jefferson, voice incredulous. Tony is usually bouncing around like an excitable eight-year-old trying to dig up all of SHIELDs secrets; he doesn't believe he hasn't uncovered this one.

"What about the Tesseract?" Steve adds.

"Or Thor and Loki," Bruce chimes in.

"Or-"

"Yeah, whatever." Tony waves off Steve's next smartass answer. "So there's technology we don't understand yet. It doesn't mean that magic is a thing."

"But magic exists, you must realize that!" Jefferson says. He leans forward in his seat, waves around hands weighed down by thick rings as he asks, "Can you not feel it? It's thin and faltering here, true, but it's still here. I can feel it in your friend, there."

He points to Clint, and Barton tenses; there's only one reason he'd feel anything like magic, and he hasn't got a chance to put an arrow through its eye yet. But it's been months. Loki's magic is still in him? Outwardly, he shuts down.

Jefferson notices, and has the decency to look apologetic. Obviously, the assassin's encounter with magic hadn't been a pleasant one.

"Prove it," Tony says suddenly.

"What?"

"Prove to me that magic exists. Go…turn Steve into a frog or something."

Jefferson sinks back into his chair, lifts his hands in a kind of shrug. "I don't have magic."

"You _don't_ have magic?" Steve challenges.

Jefferson looks at him like he's just said the dumbest thing he's heard in a long time, "Of course not. Not everyone has magic."

"What about your magic portals?" Clint asks.

"It's a unique skill." And mostly about finding the right enchanted item at the right time and bonding it to you, but he doesn't think that bit's worth mentioning. He kind of needs that hat.

"Right, so you can't prove that magic exists. There you go, someone give me a cigar! Actually, give it to Bruce, I don't like to be handed things and he looks tense."

"I didn't say that." Jefferson leans forward again, indignant. "Why don't you come on a trip with me? Name a world. I can take you to any time, any place you can think of. They'll all have magic."

"Any time?" Steve breathes. His words go unnoticed except by Clint, who shoots him an unreadable look.

"You think," Tony says slowly, "that I'll get in the car with some strange man just because he offers me candy?"

"…What?"

Bruce takes pity on him, and translates. "He means he doesn't trust you. You're an alien from a different dimension. Who's to say you won't kill us the second we turn our backs? Or lead us to a world with…with a toxic atmosphere and leave us there?"

Jefferson giggles. "Why would I kill you? You can't pay me if you're dead."

"Pay you?" Clint, somewhat bored or at least pretending, pulls a collapsible arrow out of some hidden pocket or other, and extends it. He doesn't miss the awed look on the stranger's face, so he starts twirling it around his fingers like a parade baton, only slightly showing off.

"Of course," Jefferson says. "Portal jumping doesn't pay the inns, you know. Gold does. If you accept the deal, I will take you to any one world and back, and will gladly take payment for my services."

"You're a charlatan," Tony accuses, delight curling one corner of his mouth up.

Jefferson just grins at them, all smugness and a complete lack of shame.

"Well, we'd _love_ to take you up on that offer," Tony says, pushing to his feet, "considering you have something to prove and I, the genius billionaire skeptic, have something to disprove, but I am the only one who can afford your price, you thieving dandy, you, and I say wait up. Before any of the crazy happens, let's do some tests." He claps a hand on Bruce's shoulder. Banner looks torn between seeing an alien world and joining Tony on his mad scientist shtick.

The humour is gone from Jefferson's face now. "You already collected blood."

 _"Yep!_ And now we wanna do some other poke-y prod-y things with needles and scanners and see how your supposed other dimension ticks. The interference JARVIS is getting off of you is _fantastic!_ Don't worry; the examinations won't hurt a bit. Might just be a slight pinch here and there. Unless ya fuss. Please don't fuss."

Jefferson slowly rises from his chair. He shakes his head and shrugs his hands, "Why don't we negotiate?"

"Does he look like he's fussing, Bruce? I think he looks like he's fussing." Tony takes several sauntering steps across the living room.

"Tony, if he doesn't want to-"

"Aw, c'mon! No one lets me touch Thor and he's just from a different _planet!_ This guy's from another _dimension!_ Think of the science, Banner."

Jefferson rolls his eyes, then turns and bolts. He'd been so close to making it through a deal in another world without having to run for his life, but there is always something.

He takes a chance and snatches the weird looking trinkets off the pedestals as he runs, and stashes them in his coat. He's had so much practice that it hardly slows him down. His goal is the door he entered through; one came in, only one can go back.

JARVIS keeps an eye on him. The AI lets the elevator take him to the right floor despite its occupant's confused button-pushing, and opens doors as needed. Mr. Stark's threatening bodily harm is a little unfair, after all, and the man _has_ been attacked thrice today. Besides, the billionaire has been complaining about the decorations on this floor for weeks, and JARVIS never has liked them.

In the living room, Clint sighs. "I'll get him."

But Steve goes charging after the portal jumper before Barton can do more than bounce out of his seat, and they hear as he crashes into the wall when he fails to take the corner sharp enough. Barton just shrugs, swipes the remote off the floor, and collapses onto the couch with Bruce. Tony pouts in the corner.

The Captain catches up to the stranger at the entrance to Tony's lab. Why JARVIS has let him in he doesn't know or care; Steve tackles him over the threshold and they go sprawling onto the gleaming, metal-plated floor. He lands on top of the other man, and Jefferson wheezes as the air is knocked out of his chest. Steve climbs to his feet, drags Jefferson with him by his collar.

Jefferson coughs, and chokes out, "This is twice you've tried to kill me."

"If I wanted you dead," Steve says in a voice that leaves no room for doubt, "you'd be dead."

He pushes the other man back until his hips hit a metal counter, and he pins him there, ignoring the wince this elicits. "Earlier," Steve continues, "you said 'any time.'"

Jefferson stares up at the soldier. He pulls at Steve's hands; Steve drops them to his sides and takes a step back. "Yesss," he hisses through a sharp grin. "I can take you backward or forward. Just think of the time and the place you want to go, and we'll have an adventure…for a price."

Steve looks disgusted. The fact that this man has Bucky's face sickens him. But he has a chance right now to go back seventy years, to make things right if he can. If that means he has to deal with this slimy knockoff for a few hours, then he will. "…We don't use gold anymore."

Jefferson shrugs. "Can't help you, then."

He makes to walk past Steve, but the soldier grips his arm in a vise and pulls him back around to face him.

"I guess…" Jefferson concedes, "we _could_ make a deal."

"What do you want?"

Truthfully, Jefferson doesn't need gold. He has gold. He was lying when he said portal jumping doesn't pay. _His_ portal jumping pays very well in the employ of one Rumplestiltskin. But Jefferson has never been one to pass up the opportunity for _more,_ whatever that more is. He taps his chin in thought.

Steve doesn't let it show how much this is hurting him. He stands there quietly while this twisted doppelganger puts on a show. He doesn't care what the price will be; he'll pay it gladly.

Finally, Jefferson holds up one ring-heavy finger, opens his mouth-

And the Tower bucks underneath them. Something cracks, glass shatters. Jefferson is launched nearly off his feet and crashes into Steve. A siren starts to howl as red lights flash in the lab.

"Stay here!" Steve orders, shoving Jefferson to the ground and pushing him under the metal table. It's bolted to the floor; he should be fine. The stranger looks ready to have a heart attack.

Steve runs to the nearest intercom, built into the wall near the elevator, and jabs the button that will connect him to Iron Man. "Tony, what's going on?"

Stark's answer is breezy, but Steve can hear high wind whistling in the background, and the Hulk roaring. "Hm, we're cool." On cue, the sirens fade and the lights return to their normal static white. "Some bozo with a hot-air balloon tried to attack the Tower. Hulk's got him. But the basket kind of…exploded with some kind of purple goo. Gonna take forever to clean-"

Steve disconnects, drops his head against the wall. Keeping the Avengers as public figures is a bad idea, as he's told the rest of them after each attack on the Tower. Romanoff, Barton, and Banner agree with him, as does most of SHIELD. But until he and Bruce find places of their own, and the helicarrier gets rebuilt with rooms for the spies, they don't really have a choice.

He shakes his head once, and turns back to the lab.

The portal jumper isn't where he left him cowering under the table. Steve scours the lab, checks under the desks, inside all the cabinets that are big enough, behind the door the man had been running to. But he knows.

JARVIS confirms it.

He's missed his once chance at fixing things.

Jefferson is gone.


	2. Something About Guilt

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AU in which the wraith was summoned, but no one fell into the hat.

It's been a long, long time.

He has a daughter.

He loses her.

The curse is cast.

Emma comes to Storybrooke.

The curse breaks.

_**0o0o** _

Emma buries her face in her hands and fights the urge to groan aloud too.

 _"Jefferson,"_ she says through her fingers, before lifting her head and pinning the man with her eyes, "if you don't listen to Archie, you're not going to get better."

He stirs the little silver spoon around his cold tea. It's painted with a bounding white rabbit on the handle which he deliberately covers with his thumb, and it clinks against the china. "Emma. I'm not broken," is his stubborn response.

This is the biggest lie he's told in a long time, the biggest probably, since he told Grace he'd be home for tea. Regina had chipped him like Rumple's precious cup when she walked back through the mirror in Wonderland with her father and left him stranded there, and when the Queen of Hearts found him, she'd taken a hammer to the nick and broken him clean in half. He knows that the loose stitches he's made in the 28 years since Storybrooke had been cursed into existence don't make him whole, but he's afraid that if he admits it out loud they will fray apart with every vowel and consonant until they snap completely. He can't let that happen.

"And maybe," he continues, setting the spoon down and taking a sip of his drink, "if the cricket had anything useful to say-"

"First of all, he's not a cricket anymore and he's asked you to stop calling him that." Emma can't remember how many times they've been over this. But Jefferson is bitter, and a jerk, and likes pissing her off. She knows he thinks that if he gets her angry enough she'll leave and he can get back to brooding alone with his hats while he waits for Grace. (Neither Jefferson or the Baker and his wife were too pleased about the other party's existence, despite having been friendly neighbours once upon a time, since it meant they had to arrange a schedule for Grace to be able to spend time with all of her parents. Emma, as the sheriff, had been called in to supervise the process; that was the first time she'd seen Jefferson since his poorly thought-out kidnapping of her and Mary Margaret, and the first chance they'd both had to sidestep around apologies and form a tentative friendship). She lives with Henry, though, and she's been dealing with Regina for the last year and a bit so if he really does plan to run her out, he'll have to try harder than this. "Second, you agreed to try."

Jefferson stares at her for a moment. Then he hangs his head, and slowly sets the teacup down on the glass table in the middle of his living room where they're sitting, pushes it away so it sits exactly in the center.

Emma takes it as a sign, and presses. "I know you're not crazy, nobody's saying you are." (It's mostly true; he's rich, so they call him eccentric.) "But you're not exactly…perfect." ('Readjustment-to-sanity issues,' Henry had called it when he tried to convince Mary Margaret-Snow that the Mad Hatter wasn't a threat anymore). The Grace Schedule had been written up long enough ago that Emma has seen all possible variations of Jefferson's moods: the angry days, the manic days, the depressed days, and the okay days. He isn't a danger to anyone but himself (and the rather impressive collection of hats he's made over the years that's only as thin as it is because he's quite adept with his shears when he's upset) unless he's exposed to one or more of the triggers they've worked out. So she knows he's stable enough to live alone and run around town and take care of Grace. But that doesn't mean he's whole.

"Archie's only trying to help. You agreed to see him, remember? If you don't follow his advice it just means you're wasting his time and yours, and there are plenty of other people in this wacky town who'd kill for your slot. Regina being one of them…" she finishes with a mutter, rubbing her hands together.

His shoulders tense at the mention of Regina, as everyone's tend to do. But he knows what Emma's saying. And he doesn't like it. Because Archie's right. "I know."

"So, you'll do it?"

Jefferson looks up at her, his foot tapping an anxious beat on the thick white carpet. His eyebrows are pulled together in a pout that she thinks would've gotten him out of anything as a child, but his lips are pursed in a frown. It's a look that says, _'I know I have to but please don't make me'_ and she's seen it often on Henry (mostly on school days). She doesn't let it faze her now.

"Do you know how many people-?" he says. Abruptly, he stands, paces away from the glass coffee table and the couch Emma sits on. He stabs a finger at her, shaking his head. _"I'm_ not crazy," he asserts, "But you know what? This _plan_ is! I'm not a good person, Emma, and I'll be blue in the face with talking…Grace will be old and married and have kids by the time I'm done. And there will still be people I've forgotten! And if either you or that unqualified insect think I'm going within ten feet of Regina, you should march yourselves down to that psych ward-" His voice rises with each sentence and he punctuates his statements with aggressive finger jabs. He cuts himself off and spins around, eyes wide, and slaps a hand over his face.

"Jefferson." It's spoken like a warning. Emma gets to her feet, gives him the Sheriff-Mom look she's had to use on both August and Henry that clearly tells him to settle down before she makes him.

Hand still over his mouth, he looks sideways at her. Calloused fingers scrape against a day's worth of stubble as he drops his hand back to his side. He turns to her and tilts his head in a silent challenge.

The Saviour accepts. She puts her hands on her hips, where her deliberately unloaded gun hangs in its holster, and pointedly raises her eyebrows at him. She knows what he's doing, and she won't let him get away with it. "Sit down."

Scowling, he moves over to the couch and drops to the armrest. Its close enough, Emma decides, and remains standing. "You're avoiding it," she says.

"Because it's silly," he mutters, but doesn't look at her.

"Then why did you agree to it?" They both know why, but Emma needs ( _he_ needs) to hear it out loud, in his own voice.

"So Jiminy would get his chitinous little fingers out of my head…"

"For Grace," she says. He stills. The little twitches as he taps his fingers together, the tiny jitters of his foot up and down on the rug, all stop. "You agreed to follow Archie's advice so that Grace wouldn't have to come home to find you locked in your sewing room, or smashing teacups in the kitchen, remember? So she doesn't have to walk in and find you a crying wreck on her bed…"

He looks up at her, and –oh, she thinks –that look isn't fair at all. His expression is heartbroken and heartbreaking, his eyes wide and wet, pained with the reminder that he's hurting Grace. Emma's gut twists with guilt, but she can't take back her words and she knows she doesn't (shouldn't) want to. It's necessary. No pain, no gain.

"I know," he says again. He slides to his feet, steps over and bends to pick up the tray of tea things. He doesn't look at Emma.

"Jefferson?"

"I'll start tonight." He lifts the tray, and heads for the kitchen, still doesn't look at her.

She moves to follow him, opens her mouth but he cuts her off.

" _Tonight,_ Emma," he stresses, pausing in the living room doorway. Then he walks out.

Emma stands there for a moment, and then wordlessly lets herself out of the house.

_**0o0o** _

"Do you know why you can't move on?"

Jefferson lounged on the couch in Dr. Hopper's office. His hat was sat on his lap (the one Emma had promised to help him _fix_ later), his fingers playing with a frayed edge of velvet, and his head leaning against the sofa backing. He didn't want to be here. Nobody ever wanted to be. Jefferson didn't answer.

"You mentioned something about guilt earlier," the cricket said.

"Guilt?" Jefferson laughed. "What do I have to be guilty about?" So many things, his mind supplied. Running away from the orphanage, conning his way through the Enchanted Forest, every single deal with Rumpelstiltskin, his part in making Regina what she was…His mind didn't let him think about Grace, but he had that to regret too.

"You were kept in another world against your will by a woman you said you knew not to trust. Then you were forced into the service of a tyrant and tasked with finding your way home again through impossible means. You promised Grace you'd be home for tea and you failed."

Jefferson stiffens and his blood runs cold until he is nothing but a statue. He isn't entirely sure the cricket said the last bit, knows he hasn't mentioned it in any of their sessions, but it echoes in his head.

Promised Grace.

Home for tea.

_"Your madness is founded on guilt and desperation."_

_Home for tea._

_**Getittowork.** _

With monumental effort, he managed to shrug. "So you've read my story; it doesn't mean you know me. I'm not guilty. And I am not mad."

Archie had leaned forward, his gaze earnest. The light glinted off his gold-rimmed glasses and Jefferson found himself distracted for a moment. It seemed too much to him like the flash of a needle as he stitched hat after hat after hat in the unending day that was Wonderland. There was no night there, quite a lot of the time, except when there was, and he'd work until he dropped from his chair because he had to use the light while it lasted because they never gave him a candle when it was night for days because the Queen wasn't generous enough to-

"Jefferson?"

"Hm?" He forced a smile at the man who'd been a bug and yet a man before that. A man who now pretended to be a therapist because a healthy conscience and a curse told him he could be.

"I know you think you're fine –and let's say for now that you are – but it doesn't hurt to do some self-reflection. I want you to think for me of one time you made a mistake, just one. It could be anything. Forgetting a friend's birthday, or leaving your daughter to wait for you at your neighbours' house, you moron, while you cavorted around with the Evil Queen and got yourself stuck in another land."

Okay, Jefferson blinked, he was positive Archie hadn't said that one. Unless there was a spell on the room that forced you to face the lies you told yourself. But he doubted that. Guilt? Guilt. He's definitely guilty, but it had filled him up a long time ago and it sloshed around like murky, watery tar and there's so much of it he doesn't know what to do with it. Shoving it down hadn't worked in 28 years, not since he saw Grace again through the convenient telescopes he'd found at his windows.

"Guilty..." he breathed.

Archie had looked at him expectantly, nodded just slightly. "Now I want you to go apologize."

_"What?"_

"Just pick one instance," Archie said, "one thing, and apologize. But then make a list. Go through it as you can. Take some of the guilt away. It'll be hard, I know (he would, Jefferson thought. As long as the story in Henry's book is accurate, Jiminy had royally screwed up trying to poison his parents) but it'll help."

"Right." Jefferson's eyes had slid to the clock, and he'd grinned with relief. Time to go. He'd got to his feet, flipped his hat onto his head, and given the cricket as much of a bow as he could between the couch and the small wooden table cluttered with psychological magazines. "Well, see you next week."

"Jefferson."

He'd paused with his hand on the doorknob, looked curiously but reluctantly back at the other man. Archie had got to his feet, and stood with his hands in his pockets.

"Give it a shot. What do you have to lose?"

Pride. A reputation. Possibly some blood, if he went to the wrong people.

What did he have to lose if he didn't?

_Grace._

Jefferson had all but run from the office.

_**0o0o** _

"How would like to go on a trip with me, dear Grace?" He asks later, hours after Emma's gone, and Grace has brought over her clothes for the weekend (her curse parents live closer to the school, so they get her on weekdays; he has to live with seeing her only on weekends and small holidays). They've just finished dinner, and the dishes are waiting in the sink to be put away, the water in the kettle for a good boil. Grace sits at the dining table with a novel from the school's library spread open before her. She looks up at him though, as he slides into the seat beside her.

"But no one can leave the town, Papa," she says, "Not without losing their memories. That's what they told us."

"No, no one can _cross the town border_ without losing their memories. Lucky for you," he says, tapping her on the nose, "I don't just cheat at cards." It's true; he frequently cheats at chess. But that isn't what he means. He grins as he watches her eyes grow wide. He sees the exact moment she catches on.

"Are you saying we can take the hat? You're taking me to another world?!"

The paperback falls closed. His lips split into a dazzling smile that his daughter mimics. She jumps from her seat and smashes him into a hug that rocks the chair he's sitting in.

"I get to go to another world," she says breathlessly against his chest. She pulls away and looks up at him. "Henry's gonna be so jealous."

Jefferson laughs. He stands up and ruffles her long brown hair before nudging her toward the front entrance. "Get your shoes on, dormouse, and we can get going. Unless…" he drags out.

Grace stops her mad dash to the shoe mat and turns to look at him, hesitant, afraid he's going to rescind his offer.

"…You want to grab your camera first?"

Her face lights up and she pounds up the stairs instead. She'll have proof to show off to Henry now. His mother might be the Saviour, but she got to go realm-jumping.

Jefferson stays smiling at the place she disappeared for moment before striding to the living room and pulling up the hatbox he'd lost to Regina so many years ago.

Emma had, after some time, come to Jefferson without any convincing on his part with the carrying case and the burnt, crushed, potion-stained remnants of his Hat, and offered to help him make a new one. He was pretty sure it was part contingency, part curiosity, and at least some small dab of guilt, but he wasn't going to turn down an offer like that. They spent an afternoon on choosing the right supplies, grafting in scraps of the original Hat, shaping Emma's magic…testing their results. They spent half of an hour in the Realm Room, that beautiful room between the worlds that was all his, though they didn't venture through any doors. Both were keenly aware of what happened the last time Jefferson had travelled by hat, and they didn't want to tempt bad luck when their kids were waiting for them in Storybrooke. This guilt thing of Archie's seems like a good time to test the doors.

Grace runs back down the stairs and slips her shoes on, finds him easily in the living room beside the grand piano. She's got her camera on a strap around her neck, and her hair pulled into a ponytail. Her cheeks are glowing red with excitement.

Jefferson takes her hand in one of his, and grips the felt of the hat's brim in his left. He flicks his wrist and drops the hat, sends it spinning on the carpet as smoky purple magic swirls out over the rim.

Grace threads their fingers as he yells over the vortex for her to jump.

They jump together, disappearing into the magic. Gradually it fades, sucking itself into the cap until the living room is silent, nothing out of place but the black top hat on the floor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would...really appreciate feedback.


	3. What It's Like

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Post-CA: The Winter Soldier

It's raining cats and dogs outside the Tower. Rain rattles against the reinforced glass beside her as Pepper walks along, tapping manicured nails on the Stark data pad as she sorts through folders of troubling information. She looks up as the battering escalates, and a sense of relief steals over her that their current guest found his way here before the sky opened up and started dumping several days' worth of freezing water on them.

The muffled pounding of the rain, and the sharp _tack_ of her high heels on dusty tiles, echoes back from the drywall and steel girders that make up the half-finished storey. Other than herself, the entire level is empty, off-limits technically, while renovation is done after the last attack on the Tower. It feels hollow, and there are a million other places she could go that would qualify as a solitary haven, but this was the first button she'd pushed on the elevator. It's quiet, so she stays.

The information on the Starkpad is troubling, and it's taking a lot of self-control not to let the tears that cloud her vision fall. This is why she's isolated herself though, just in case they do, because the last thing anyone needs is to deal with her current overabundance of empathy. She just needs to get the file read through once, and then she'll be fine. Then she can focus on helping.

"Ms. Potts?"

Pepper sniffs, shocked at the sudden voice coming from the pad in her hands, and pauses.

"JARVIS?"

"I didn't mean to alarm you," the AI says, "but you have unexpected guests."

Frowning, Pepper looks behind her to the elevator and then glances around the room in confusion. The floor is just as empty as it's been since she came up here. Maybe the storm is messing with JARVIS' remote connection (although, she thinks, that hasn't happened in years).

"Welcome back, Mr. Jefferson," JARVIS says.

"JARVIS, there's-" Pepper cuts off, raising her eyebrows in surprise as she catches movement in her peripheral vision and looks up to find two people standing on the threshold of a previously empty door frame. "Oh."

It's a man and a small girl, clutching tightly to each other's hands like they're afraid the other is going to disappear. The man looks pale and stressed, and stands rigid in place, but the girl's face is excited as she peers around, like she's expecting to find something other than the under-construction skyscraper she's standing in.

"Hello," Pepper says, at a loss for the appropriate procedure for strangers appearing out of thin air. The least she can do is act civil, call up the panic button on the data pad, and hope that these two aren't enemies of the Avengers.

"Good morning," the man says quietly.

The voice is strained, familiar, Pepper thinks, and she steps closer to get a better look at him. Eyes narrowing, she scans his face. _"Bucky?"_

But that's impossible. The Winter Soldier is downstairs with Steve, shut up in a guest room while the Captain tries to get him settled, and maybe to open up about where he's been for the last few months. But other than the clean-shaven face and the short hair, this man looks identical. Pepper takes a quick peek at his left hand, the one holding onto the little girl: flesh and bone. Not Bucky.

But the man winces like he recognizes her confusion. "My name's Jefferson. This is my daughter, Grace."

Pepper introduces herself, and catches the way the girl's eyes narrow. "You've been here before, I take it?"

JARVIS had called the man by name, after all. She's going to assume they're not a threat, for now.

Jefferson nods, lips pressed firmly together. "Is Steve here?" he asks. His daughter tugs on his arm, and though he leans down slightly, he shakes his head and doesn't answer her call for attention.

"He's downstairs," Pepper starts, unsure of whether or not the Captain would appreciate an interruption, especially one that looks like this. "But this isn't a good time. Have you-?"

A brief jingle from the Starkpad makes Pepper look down. An icon flashes, an IM from Tony.

' _JARVIS says you're talking to that crazy world-hopping pansy_ I told you _wasn't a hallucination. Tell him I want my stuff back :('_

She resists the urge to roll her eyes and types back, _'You hated that stuff anyway. I'll ask before he leaves.'_

' _Keep him away from anything expensive.'_

Pepper turns the data pad off and tucks it under her arm. "Well," she says, "the least we can do is let Steve know you're here."

She smiles politely at the father and daughter, leads them into the elevator, and touches the button for the community floor.

"Papa," the girl whispers, a vain effort in such a tiny space but Pepper pretends she can't hear anyway. "They're real! You know the Avengers?"

"No," Jefferson answers quietly back, "I was only here for maybe an hour, a long time ago. And it wasn't the best first impression." He seems to be quite bad at those lately. He still hasn't really apologized to Emma for drugging her at their first meeting; he's been waiting for a good time, some way to make it special so she knows he truly means it. 'Sorry' won't cut it with her. It won't cut it here.

The elevator doors open to a room Jefferson has never seen before: open, carpeted, with a big fireplace, a bigger television, and a smattering of leather couches and chairs. There's a bar nestled in the corner beside a wall of windows, stocked with bottles in all of the rainbow's colours. A woman stands behind the counter, dropping ice cubes into a glass.

She pretends to ignore them as they come closer, but Jefferson can see her quick assessment of them, the way she casually angles herself to face them. He misses the minute widening of her eyes as she scans his face, though.

"Natasha," Pepper says.

"Hey." Natasha reaches behind the counter and pulls out a thin bottle, pours amber liquid into her glass. "Who're your friends?"

"This is Jefferson, the dimension-hopper Tony scared away a few years ago…"

"The one who swiped his stupid figurines on the way out? I wanted to thank you for that, except he still won't shut up about it. I'm Natasha." She sticks a hand out and they shake. Her hands are strong and calloused, but not like his. Needles and scissors leave different marks from those of guns and knives, and he is very glad he's only meeting her after Henry's very brief descriptions of the Avengers. Black Widow, Master Assassin.

The woman bends down and tips her head at his daughter. "And who's this?"

"I'm Grace," the girl says, ignoring the warning squeeze of her father's hand. "It's _really_ cool to meet you."

"Yeah?" Natasha's got a small grin on her face, "Well, I think it's cool to meet you. Crossing dimensions is a pretty rare thing. You're lucky."

"Yeah, but _you're_ the Black Widow. And you're real. I thought we were the only-"

"Grace," Jefferson shakes his head at her, a small warning not to go flaunting their neighbours' stories. He isn't sure why he doesn't want it known that their lives are children's tales (and he knows that if they really wanted to, the women could easily wheedle the information out of Grace) but he feels like maybe it's a secret best kept, like the nature of his portal. It doesn't cross his mind that maybe he's embarrassed, he doesn't let it.

Natasha glances at him, then presses the glass into Grace's hand as she straightens up.

"Relax, its apple juice," she says, at the look on Jefferson's face. "So. People don't usually cross universes to return to the scenes of their crimes two years later. What brings you here?"

"I need to talk to Steve." 

"It's not a good time." 

"I know." But he's not leaving. If he leaves, then the excuse that he gave it a good try becomes valid and he won't be coming back, cricket's advice or not. "But it's important."

Natasha stares at him for a long moment, searching, then shrugs and disappears down the hallway to the left. Grace fiddles with her camera; Pepper tells them it will just be a minute. Jefferson kneels down and looks up at Grace, his hands on her shoulders to steady them both.

"I just need to talk to Captain Rogers for a few minutes. I won't be long."

"I'll stay right here, Papa."

"Maybe you can ask Ms. Potts turn on the TV for you?" He glances at Pepper, who smiles and nods. Grace beams.

"Do you have a USB?" she asks. "Papa, can I show them some of the comic pages I took pictures of?"

Jefferson stands up, a light frown on his face, but Grace doesn't wait for an answer and bounces over to the other side of the room after Pepper.

There are muffled footsteps on the white carpet behind him as Natasha returns with Steve. She slips right past Jefferson and plunks herself down on the arm of a couch as Pepper plays with a button-crowded remote control and tries to balance two others in her opposite hand.

It's clear that the assassin has already enlightened Steve of his presence here; the soldier's face is carefully neutral, his shoulders tense and slightly defensive. He's stopped at the entranceway, and doesn't look willing to come much closer.

"What are you doing here?" Steve says in a voice free of inflection.

Jefferson takes a few precise steps towards him. "I owe you a trip."

Then he grimaces, very aware of how tactless he's being. Normally, his deals involve a lot more flattery and better rapport. But he doesn't want to be here. He just wants the nagging little voice in his head that sounds like Steve Rogers to quiet.

Steve takes the offer about as well as he should. He glares, crosses his arms. "Two years overdue. What's the interest rate?"

This time, Jefferson flinches. He's not sure if it's guilt or the sudden realization that getting Steve to understand that his offer is sincere will be nigh on impossible. Especially when his first instinct is to shrug on the carefree millionaire who greeted Emma the first time and pretend it isn't.

"I'm paying it," he says quietly. "It's only been two years for _you_ ; I've had a long time think about this. Let me make it up to you. I'm here to apologize."

"Apologize," Steve says, a tiny grin crooking his lips. "Right. Look, I don't have time for this, so why don't you run back to your magic portal and-"

"No," Jefferson says, shaking his head. " _Listen._ I _need_ to apologize! I knew exactly what you wanted and I guessed at the why, and I was using it against you. But I know what it's like now-"

Rage darkens Steve's face and he crosses the short distance between them in two long strides. He looms over the portal-jumper. "You _know what it's like?_ What happened, you get screwed out of a jewelry box? I'm sure you're just overflowing with empathy, and that's great, but this really isn't the time. So, leave."

Jefferson smiles and it's not a happy expression. He looks Steve in the eye and says, "Someone close to you disappears..."

"Jefferson," Steve says, warning.

"...lost forever, or so you think."

Super soldier or not, there's nothing this man can do to him that wasn't done better by the Queen of Hearts. His scar prickles at the thought of Wonderland, and he corrals his thoughts away from those memories. This isn't the time, not here, not in front of Steve.

"Someone offers you a way back and you accept!"

_"Don't."_

"It doesn't work, and it _burns_." Jefferson brings clawed hands to shred at the air by his temples, his face twisted with anger, "It _tears_ at you!"

Steve doesn't see red; he sees crimson paisley and grabs at the scarf, dragging the portal-jumper so close the guy's on tip-toes. "I said don't."

He's well aware of Natasha watching them in the reflection of whatever picture Stark's got on the wall this month, but he's also aware that if she objected she wouldn't just be watching. Instead, when he glances up, she shakes her head slightly at him and rubs subtly at her throat. He reluctantly lets go and takes a step back, glaring at the man in front of him.

Jefferson doesn't move except to settle back down on flat feet and to let one corner of his pouty lips pull up against his glower.

"Do you want the jump or not?" he asks, and Steve can hear the finality in the question.

He looks behind him down the hallway.

This is the last offer, he knows, his last chance to go back and fix things (unless he can manage to find someone else powerful and indifferent enough to let him rewrite history). Two years ago, he'd said 'yes' in less time than it took him to lose his whole world. But now that he's got the choice again, now that he's spent time in the future and made a team and _found Bucky_ …now, he's not so sure.

Yes, he can go back and save Bucky, before they brainwash him, before they change him, before he _falls._ But then what? He'll have Bucky, they'll win the war, they'll grow old (or Bucky will, is a horrifying notion he quickly squashes) and die. Life will go on.

Except that it won't. Loki and his army, HYDRA and whatever substitute they pick to be their Winter Soldier, the looming threat of the mutants, the rise of supervillains –Fury was right, the world needs Captain America.

But Bucky needs Steve; he can't just leave him to suffer at the hands of HYDRA.

And as much as he wants to leave it at that, Steve knows he needs Bucky too.

He looks back at the portal-jumper.

"Yes," he says.

Jefferson nods. His gaze turns down, becomes calculating. Steve watches him carefully, quietly sorting through his own affairs.

They stand in silence for a minute.

Then Natasha cackles (honestly, and Jefferson may not be the person to ask, but he doesn't think comic-Clint's old, _very purple_ costume is that bad), and startles both of them into looking over.

"Who's she?" Steve asks, frowning and nodding at the little girl he hadn't noticed before.

"She's my daughter," Jefferson says, smiling faintly but fondly at the little girl, "My Grace."

"Daughter?" Steve's gaze drops to the man's left hand, and then he really looks at the portal-jumper. He hadn't noticed before (because he _still_ looks exactly like Bucky, and because Steve has been doing his best to _not see_ that) but Jefferson looks at least ten years older than the last time he'd seen him. "How long has it been for you?"

"A lifetime," Jefferson says bitterly, grinning like there's some inside joke and picking at his fingers. He makes some odd motion with his hands that Steve can't decipher and then glares at the wall.

Steve decides not to ask. He looks back at the hallway, and then at Jefferson.

"So," he says. "Magic portal ride."

Jefferson shakes his head. "We can't go right now. I'll have to come back…"

"Why?" Steve narrows his eyes, looming again. The phrase 'fool me once…' hollers out from the back of his mind. He's not going to let this man out of his sight, not going to let the coward run again. They have a deal and Jefferson's going uphold his end even if Steve has to dig his own hole in the universe and carry the man across.

"There's a rule," Jefferson says, meeting his eyes and making that motion with his hands again, "for the portal. The same number of people that go in have to come out. You can't take anyone back without- without leaving someone there."

Steve does the math rather quickly, all things considered.

He huffs a laugh and then drops his head, puts his hands on his hips. He's not quite sure what his face is doing when he looks back up, but it's probably disbelief. "So before, even if you hadn't run I couldn't have come with you. You- you are…unbelievable."

Steve's not sure if he wants to strangle the man or throw him off the roof. Maybe hand him over to Tony for those CAT scans or however the billionaire was going to test for magic. A good, solid right hook if it wouldn't pop his head off (if the daughter wasn't here). Wait-

Steve looks from Jefferson to the girl, to Jefferson again, and narrows his eyes. "Why is she here? Were you…? You're not going to leave your own daughter in another world? What if something happened?"

Jefferson blinks, frowns like he doesn't quite understand what was just said even as his lips open to retort. Steve can see when it clicks; the portal-jumper's face goes red. "You-!

Before he can recover enough to say much of anything, however, Steve hears the sound he's been dreading. He glances back at the hallway, then grabs Jefferson by the collar and hauls him into the nearest empty room off the lounge.

"What the H-?"

"Shut up!"

Steve keeps the door cracked open, peering out through the inch of space he allows between the wood panel and the frame. Jefferson stays hunched over the chair he's been thrown at, warily examining the soldier crouched down and spying through a door. Then he slinks over. He puts a steadying elbow on Steve's shoulder and leans over him to peek into the lounge as well.

"What are you looking at?"

At first, there's nothing to see but the wall of rain-streaked windows and the corner of the bar. Then Jefferson hears, over the murmur of Pepper's and Grace's conversation, the light pad of feet treading slowly over carpet. Steve tenses, shrugs Jefferson off, and turns around to look at him with a glare and a finger to his lips. Then he goes back to watching.

Out of the recess of the hallway, a man edges into view, and both Jefferson and Steve freeze. He's wearing sweatpants and a t-shirt, and his hair is longer than Jefferson ever let his get even in Wonderland, but he knows who this is. How can he not? It's only a profile, but it's the same face he sees every day, in every reflective surface he comes across. But didn't Bucky die?

The man doesn't take more than two steps before Natasha is there, speaking softly but firmly in Russian. They hear him ask a faint question that, by the little tilt of her head, Steve knows she evades. Jefferson wishes he still had the enchanted ring that let him understand languages, but it's been lost to Regina's curse for twenty-eight years. He tries to watch body language, but it's faint in both of them to the point of nonexistence.

Natasha calmly lifts her right hand and offers the hallway, inviting Bucky back to wherever he came from. The man stares at her, unmoving, for a long moment before finally he gives a minute nod and lets the assassin shadow him back down the corridor. When he turns, there's a flash of silver, and horror spills cold water over Jefferson's guts. He leans back.

Steve closes the door and turns to fall against it, pulls his knees up.

"He can't know you're here," the solider says. "He's running a high fever, and whatever they did to him to make him forget is…He's not in a good place right now. If he saw you, I don't know what he'd think. Maybe that I was trying to replace him. That's the last thing he needs."

Jefferson wants to ask about Bucky, about the metal arm, about how the man is still alive but he hears the word, the one word Steve said that he's been begging himself for years to do.

"…Forget?"

Steve looks up at him, something in his voice (does he sound as desperate as he always does? The curse is broken, he doesn't need to forget anymore) making the man frown.

"Yeah," Steve says carefully, his narrowed eyes searching Jefferson's face. "HYDRA, they, uh, wiped his mind, turned him into a machine. He doesn't remember much, just enough that he couldn't let me die, that he found his way here."

"He doesn't remember…anything?"

_How ironic is that!?_ Jefferson's mind screams at him as he sniggers, eyes crinkling. He can't hold back the twisted humour pounding against his ribs so he laughs. It's painful, on the edge of hysterics. _In all the realms, what are the odds? He and Bucky! An arm and a head!_

Jefferson laughs until he collapses back on the chair from earlier, his eyes wet, his lungs crying for air.

_He doesn't remember!_

He keeps laughing. It hurts. He can't stop.

Steve slaps him.

With a sob, Jefferson sobers, and it's only Steve gripping his collar again that keeps him from melting to the floor.

"What's wrong with you?" Steve looks like he doesn't know whether to be angry or scared, so Jefferson picks for him. Scared is better (even though he's _fine_ ); that slap hurt and he doesn't want another one. His cheek feels swollen.

"He _forgot!"_

"What-?"

"Two different men in two different realms. Both have the same face," he explains, waving vaguely at his own. "And he can't remember! I _couldn't forget_. Steve, I'd have done anything –I did do anything –but I always, _always_ remembered. The whole town forgot but not me. That was my curse!"

He blinks rapidly, staring up at Steve like that account was supposed to make sense. Maybe it would, to someone else. What town? What curse?

Steve catches him making that spastic sewing gesture again and clamps his hands firmly around the other's wrists until he stops fighting. Jefferson looks ready to run anywhere that Steve isn't, so Steve remains where he is, standing in front of the occupied chair.

Jefferson cracks his neck nervously and Steve catches something he definitely wasn't supposed to. It's pretty well hidden behind the scarf, and only visible because grabbing at the man's collar so much has loosened the fold in the paisley fabric. He feels something twist in his core.

"What the Hell happened to you?" He demands the answer with no small amount of compassion.

Because as much as he'd like to be done with the portal-jumper, _that's_ not a normal scar, not at all, and he needs that story. There's only one thing he can think of that would make that kind of wound and he's pretty sure it has a 100% fatality rate.

Jefferson gives him a smile that would have been gleeful if it wasn't so crazed. "I left my daughter in another world," he says, parroting Steve. "Something happened."

Steve gives him his best 'Well, No Shit' Face and asks, "You want to elaborate?"

Jefferson's hands twitch again, and he grimaces. He doesn't meet Steve's eyes. "No."

"Jefferson-"

" _No."_

"Alright." Steve knows when not to push. He locks his curiosity away and carefully offers a hand to help the man up.

"I think I should leave." Jefferson crosses the room and opens the door. Staring at the doorknob, he says, "Pleasure doing business with you, Captain. We'll be back."

He and Steve have reached an agreement, hesitant, shaky, hardly even a deal; but he's done what he came here to do, and neither he nor the Captain want to spend too much more time together. They managed to be civil, had a little heart-to-heart. He doesn't want to push it.

"Yeah." Steve follows the man out and they walk over to the TV, and the women chatting on the couches.

"Grace," Jefferson says, "time to go."

"Aw, Papa!" But she sets about cleaning up, grabbing the camera and carefully disconnecting it, rolling up the posters that Natasha suddenly appears with.

As Grace says goodbye to Pepper, the assassin turns to Jefferson. "Why is a raven like a writing-desk?" she asks.

Jefferson flinches and mutters, "I don't know," without looking at her. He takes Grace's hand as the girl rounds the couch and lets Pepper show them back up to the frame of a door that they came through without saying anything more.

"What was that about?" Steve asks, glancing down at Nat as the elevator closes.

Natasha smiles a Cheshire grin and rolls backward over the sofa so that she's lying with her head on the seat cushions and her feet bobbing in Steve's face.

"Testing a theory," she drawls, wiggling her feet.

"A theory? About what?"

Nat quirks an eyebrow, raising herself up a little to look Steve in the eye. "You just spent how long with this guy and you didn't bother to find out who he is? I'm disappointed in you, Rogers."

Steve purses his lips, Natasha smirks. She continues. "Grace is cute, but she's a bad liar. And she's even worse at keeping secrets-"

Steve rolls his eyes. "Imagine that, a trained spy getting secrets out of a twelve-year-old."

"They're fairy tales, Steve."

"…What?"

"To them," Natasha says, rolling off the couch and wandering around it to stand next to the soldier, her tone serious, "we're comics and cartoon movies. To us, they're fairy tales."

Steve, dumbfounded, nods slowly until he finds the words to ask, "Fairy tales…as in-?"

"As in, Grace is friends with Hansel and Gretel, and Snow White is her elementary school teacher."

"Oh."

"Apparently, Doctor Frankenstein is an MD at the local hospital."

Oh. "So, the raven and the writing desk…"

"Not traditionally a fairy tale but congratulations, Cap! You just had your first tête-à-tête with a literary character."

A literary character. Right. Steve's just made a deal to travel through time with a trans-dimensional con-artist Mad Hatter. He decides he's not going to address that point before it really sinks in and he maybe has a chance to review _Alice's Adventures in Wonderland_. ("Off with his head," though. That's the Queen of Hearts. It's also the most likely explanation for the scar on the other man's neck. He doesn't feel any better for having put those pieces together.)

"Jefferson mentioned something about a curse. He said that the whole town forgot something."

Natasha avoids his eyes, inspecting her short, clean fingernails instead. "Grace didn't elaborate. Said she wasn't supposed to talk about it; but, from what I got, _Snow White_ 's Evil Queen cast a curse that erased everyone's memories and gave them new lives. 'No more happy endings,'" she says, making air quotes with the hand she'd been examining.

Steve rolls it over in his mind and ends up feeling slightly queasy. Yes, seeing how much Jefferson cared for his daughter, Steve realizes that he would have known what it was like with him and Bucky. If the portal jumper was the only one who remembered himself, and Grace was his happy ending, then his daughter wouldn't have been his daughter. The curse would've kept her from remembering him, no matter how hard he tried to get her to. Steve thinks that if it were him, he would've gone insane (Hell, he is going insane; he's running himself ragged trying to help Bucky in various exercises of futility). If the man was already a little 'mad…'

"I need to check on Buck," he says, grimacing.

Natasha doesn't say anything as he turns away, just wanders over to the bar to finish preparing her drink.

Steve heads back up the hallway, wondering if he should stop to make some soup first, something thin that Bucky can keep down. He decides he'll check in first; he's been gone long enough.

His footsteps stutter when he realizes he and the Jefferson never agreed when to meet again, just that they would. The man could be coming back in a few hours. Or it could take him days to find someone willing to stay in the Avengers' world. Would that even matter? He doesn't know the time conversion between their worlds, and Jefferson can time travel.

"Shit," Steve huffs. Guess he'll just have to wait. And hope he doesn't get screwed over again.

 


	4. Everything is Peachy

Apologizing was supposed to make him feel better.

Jefferson feels queasy instead. He's felt sick ever since his first glimpse of Bucky Barnes in the Avenger's world.

The ginger tea he makes himself while trying to get Grace settled for her delayed bedtime doesn't help.

Lying down on the couch and staring at the raised pattern on the ceiling for an hour doesn't help.

Putting his hat over his eyes and spending several more hours thinking about his predicament with Steve Rogers _really_ doesn't help. He's beginning to suspect that the nausea may be all in his head, which means it's a good time to get up and move.

Jefferson rolls off the couch in one sudden, frantic motion, dislodging the forgotten hat from his head and stirring up genuine motion sickness behind his eyes. He waits a beat until it fades, then scoops up his hat from the tea-stained white carpet and races up the stairs to the second floor. He tiptoes speedily down the hallway to Grace's room and quietly cracks open the door.

His daughter sleeps curled up, blankets tucked over her head to keep out the midmorning sunlight fighting to get past the drawn curtains, breathing steadily. He stares for a moment, just watching the small bundle of patch-pattern covers rise and fall, because he still has a hard time believing that his little girl –his very real, not hallucinatory daughter –found him again.

Then he creeps in and over to the nightstand, lifts the walkie-talkie from its charger. He plants a kiss on the little hand she's got poked out of her nest, and then steals back out to the hall and down to the living room.

Now that he's moving again, he finds he can't stop. His legs are fidgety and his arms squirmy with restless energy, so he paces familiar trails round the ground floor as he fiddles with the radio, trying to open the right channel.

"Henry, are you there?"

It's quiet for the length of time it takes him to stalk across the kitchen and then,

" _Jefferson? Hold on a minute, I just got to my mom's."_

Oh. He pauses, frowning at his reflection in the chrome kettle. Which mom? Then he decides the answer doesn't affect his plans whatsoever and resumes his trek. Another minute, another room, until the radio hisses,

" _Are you alright?"_

In the dining room, Jefferson bristles, and taps the Speak button to tell the princeling that yes, he is perfectly, absolutely fine, thank you very much. Except it's a perfectly, absolutely relevant question. This is Henry's radio channel. The one he uses to oversee spy missions with Emma and Grace and who knows who else, the one that Jefferson has never, ever used before.

"I'm fine," he grinds out. "Can you talk?"

He's a liar, but that's old news. The answer to the mom question is an extremely important one. If Henry is at Emma's place, it would be better to invite the both of them over for late afternoon tea when he gets Grace up. But if he's at the Mayor's house, well, the less Jefferson has to do with Regina, the happier everyone will be.

" _It's Saturday,"_ Henry says. _"Mom's at a council meeting for another half an hour, but then I'll_ have _to start my homework."_

The boy is at Regina's then. Well, they've only got a half hour, so Jefferson resumes his pacing and demands into the walkie-talkie,

"I need to know everything you do about Captain America."

As it turns out, there's quite a lot that Henry knows about the super soldier. Jefferson paces the entire time they talk, taking mental notes and following tangents in the story until he catches himself and steers Henry away from mutants and Inhumans and Guardians, and back to Cap. He almost wishes the other man came with a leather-bound storybook; there's a lot to learn, and Henry tends to babble in circles.

Finally, there's a panicked squawk from Henry's end and the radio goes dead. Jefferson figures that the evil queen has just come home to her castle and wants her prince in his place. Too bad. But he thinks he's got enough information to come out of this deal alive now.

Jefferson flips the walkie-talkie once, then turns to the stairs to replace it on its charger and go wake Grace. If she sleeps any longer today, she'll be awake all night.

**0o0o**

Jefferson gives Steve a week. Granted, it would only be about half a day for the Avenger, but the hatter figures it's enough time for the man to get his head around the concept of time travel and make a plan of action. As it is, Jefferson needs the time for himself more. He needs to find someone to leave in the other realm so that he can take Steve into the hat, someone that no one (Emma) will notice missing (him taking).

He is delayed, of course, by his daughter's presence, but that's more of a boon than a drawback.

Grace calls Henry on Sunday, and Regina drops the princeling off at the library for a 'study group.' From there, the little truant walks up the hill to the wide blue mansion and arrives in time for a brunch of pancakes, fruit salad, and exaggerated tales of an adventure to another world. Somehow, the kids get into an argument over which Avenger is the best, and then before he knows it, Jefferson finds himself playing Doctor Doom for the afternoon in a mock battle for the ground floor. And then Grace leaves, back to her make-believe parents, and he retreats to his sewing room.

Dusk to dawn to dusk and dawn again, he makes hats.

When he can pull himself away on Tuesday morning, he walks down to the main street to Granny's diner, spots Archie Hopper grabbing a cup of coffee before work, and makes an impromptu beeline to Gold's Pawn Shop.

Belle is leaning over one of the glass display cases opposite Rumplestiltskin, who pulls away when the bell over the door announces Jefferson's presence.

"I need something," the portal jumper says into the dusty silence.

"Yes, dearie," Gold sighs, "most people who come to me do."

Belle gives Jefferson a wide smile, lingering amity after his rescue of her from the asylum, perhaps? (He hasn't told her he had an ulterior motive, but considering her relationship to the Dark One, he figures she knows and is grateful anyway). With a warning look at Rumple, she excuses herself to the back of the shop.

"Now," Gold says, "what kind of deal shall we make? I hear you got your hat working again, and your daughter forgave you, so what is it you could possibly need from me?"

"Actually," Jefferson says, feigning ease as he meanders up toward the counter Gold has rested his elbows on, "it's not what I need _from_ you, it's what you need me to do _for_ you."

"Oh?" The imp-turned-man smiles, humouring his once business partner.

"And for Belle."

Rumplestiltskin's lips pucker. It's only years of having dealt with this before Wonderland that keeps Jefferson from reacting to the dangerous look that enters the man's eyes.

"I hear," Jefferson drawls, running his fingers over a dusty wooden Ferris wheel as he passes it, "that the owner of a certain flower shop has been giving you trouble simply by existing?"

"What are you getting at, Hatter?"

"I'd like to take him off your hands."

Gold leans over the counter until his long nose is inches from Jefferson's. "Do not presume to fight my battles for me. Dearie. It's a nice offer, but get out of my shop. _Before_ I make you."

His fingers smudge purple ash on the glass as the man folds his arms and leans back.

Jefferson shrugs, grinning unconcernedly and twirls toward the exit. "Well, if you do ever find yourself in need of a way to get rid of someone permanently without breaking any promises not to kill or harm said person you might or might not want to get rid of...come talk to me."

Gold stays silent as Jefferson leaves, and the Hatter's smile drops like deadweight as the shop's door clinks shut.

He ticks one mark on a mental list of candidates, adjusts his scarf, and heads deeper into town; he needs to see a man about a puppet. And maybe, on his way back, if he fails to obtain August's favour, he can try to dig Smee out of whatever rat hole he's hiding in.

**0o0o**

Both the puppet and the trader are a dead end, if only because he couldn't find Smee.

Jefferson spends most of the following day at Granny's diner, sipping watery tea and pitching to incoming patrons. Around three o'clock, though, Archie Hopper walks through the front door, and Jefferson's eyes go wide. He clasps his tea and spins his barstool away, his hat on his lap, praying that the cricket hasn't seen him.

"Jefferson," Archie says, and the Hatter cringes.

"Doctor Hopper!" he gushes, sweeping his hat onto his head as he swivels back around. From the odd look, he figures Archie wasn't expecting such an enthusiastic greeting. That, or his teacup has ended up on the brim of his hat, which –yes, it has –takes no effort to balance. "Fancy meeting you here, I was just about to leave!"

"I missed you yesterday, Jefferson. Is everything alright?"

Oh, he wishes people would stop asking him that.

"Right as apples," he says, grinning around the urge to run. "You know, I was thinking...you're not a real psychiatrist and I am not mad. Maybe we should just stop wasting our time, and cancel all future sessions!"

Archie frowns and reaches slowly up to rescue the empty diner teacup from the lip of Jefferson's hat. "If that's what you really want to do, I can't stop you."

"Good."

Jefferson hops down from his stool, tips his hat at Archie, and moves to walk around him.

"But I urge you to remember why you came to me in the first place. And I don't mean that Sheriff Swan and the Bakers gave you an ultimatum."

"…Grace." He means Grace. Jefferson's fingers clench, and his wrists dance his hands around in a familiar pattern through the air. He turns to stare at the psychiatrist.

"Yes, Grace. We've talked. She says you seem calmer now. You are more accepting of the fact that she has to leave on Sunday nights. Your therapy is working Jefferson, and I think it would be detrimental for you to quit now."

Maybe, Jefferson thinks, he should take Pongo through the hat. But he agrees to meet Archie at the usual time next Tuesday.

**0o0o**

He isn't sure if visiting the fairies on Thursday is a worse idea than approaching Rumplestiltskin or not, but it's too late now. He stands in the front hall of the convent, near paralyzed by the heavy weight of magic seeping from every corner of this place. Maybe he should have come here to make his new hat. Maybe he should move in here; the magic is intoxicating.

After too long and not long enough, the young sister who met him at the door rounds the corner at the hall's end, a stern looking, red-haired woman beside her. Reul Ghorm. Jefferson straightens his jacket as they approach and tries to look humble, dipping his head just slightly when they stop in front of him.

"You wished to speak to me?"

"Mother Superior," Jefferson says, wringing his hands and doing his best to look hopeful, "I was hoping you would allow one of your sisters to accompany me to another world. I have a friend who needs help, of the kind that only fairies can provide, and now that the curse is broken and I have a way back..."

Mother Superior frowns at him, "You are the Mad Hatter. Wasn't your portal destroyed by the wraith?"

Jefferson scowls before he can stop himself, then shifts his expression more towards neutrality. "Emma fixed it," he says. "Please, it's just a few-"

"I'm afraid I must decline," she says, her voice firm and her nose turned up just slightly. "There is danger in traveling between realms, as your own history attests to, and I will not endanger any of my fairies' lives. I am sorry, but good luck with your friend, Hatter."

The younger woman, the one who meets with the balding dwarf to sail around the bay, hesitates. But before she can say anything, Reul Ghorm touches her arm and guides her away with a quiet, "Nova," spoken like a reprimand. Jefferson glares, and relieves the goodly Mother of the small sack of fairy dust she's got tucked into the belt of her blue robe for his trouble.

He's got one day left on his self-imposed time limit to find someone.

**0o0o**

He goes looking for Smee again. Nobody will miss the little coward, and Jefferson's sure he would be glad to go where Rumplestiltskin can't hurt him. And it's not likely that Emma will begrudge him for _Smee_ of all people.. _._ at least, he hopes not.

But the man isn't at any of the places Jefferson's seen him visit through the telescopes. He's not working at the Game of Thorns, not skulking around the docks, not in the bar downtown that he frequents. Jefferson is starting to run out of places to look.

Then he stalks around the corner and bumps into Mr. Gold. The man is carrying a square case, a bit bigger than Jefferson's worn hat box, and leaning heavily on his cane.

"Jefferson," he says, his lips turned up in a rather off-putting smile, "just the man I was looking for."

Jefferson stands rigid for a moment, uncomfortable, unprepared to face this demon. Then he grins a Cheshire cat grin and pushes all the tension away.

"Have you seen the man _I'm_ looking for? I'm afraid I can't find him. Slimy little pirate by the name of William Smee."

Gold's smile twitches wider. "He's a little tied up at the moment."

Well, Jefferson thinks, that explains things. He slips his hands into his pockets and waits for Rumplestiltskin to speak.

"I've considered your offer, dearie, and I'm here to make you a new one."

"Oh?"

Gold lifts the case higher, "Two souls to do with as you please. In exchange, you keep your word and dispose of Moe French for me."

"...Now?" Jefferson raises an eyebrow. Why not just give him French in the first place?

Gold shoves the case at the Hatter's chest and Jefferson scrambles to grab hold of it. "I will call you. You will do it then, and not a moment sooner."

Jefferson considers it. "You won't call when Emma's around, will you?"

"Where the saviour is when I do is your concern, not mine. Do we have a deal?"

"You're being awfully generous," Jefferson says, and maneuvers the case around so he can hold it by the handle. "Two souls for the price of one?"

"Don't worry about that. It's not your price to pay."

The Hatter considers. He'd worked with Rumplestiltskin long enough and heard enough of the tales before that to know of the Dark One's ability to see the future. He'd also known him long enough that asking for more information would only lead them in circles.

He weighs his options once before he forces a smile and holds out his hand.

Gold grabs it, they shake, and Jefferson feels a small spark of magic bind them to their words. Then Gold turns and leaves without further ado.

Standing alone in the darkening street, Jefferson takes a minute to peek into the case.

Two puppets lay tangled up with each other inside, dressed in common peasants' clothes from the Enchanted Forest. He knows who they are –who they were.

Saturday's queasy feeling rushes back, and he snaps the case closed and hurries back to his house.

Grace will be dropped off soon and he doesn't want her waiting alone; she's done too much of that already.

He's ready to take Steve back now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gold's Pawn Shop is having a BOGO on not-so-living sacrifices! Come by and get your guilt-free savings now!


	5. Dodgeball(istics)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 5, version 6.

 

He has no idea what he's doing.

 It's a feeling Steve's gotten used to in the last few years. It's a feeling he doesn't like at all. His life since Erskine made his offer has been one huge improvisation; a body suddenly without illness, a war-torn world of previously undreamt opportunities, a Nazi army with alien technology – all new and unexpected, but handled with a shrug and a quip, or maybe a wink if Bucky wasn't too busy burying his head in his hands. They were things he'd accepted and punches he'd rolled with, but...

But.

Since he'd woken up from the ice, everything has been one guess after another. Every choice based on tired instincts and half-given information. He feels out of place, out of time, and it is something he's been learning to live with. He has been adapting, fitting in, making a new life in a new world where he is Captain America first, Steve Rogers second.

SHIELD had helped. They'd given him a purpose, grounded him. Even if he didn't always agree with their methods, he respected what they stood for. Or he thought he did.

SHIELD fell, rotted from the inside by the very monster he thought he had died to end, and brought his sense of purpose crashing down with it. His sacrifice had been for nothing. A zero sum.

And then Bucky had come back, a vengeful ghost from the past, with no idea who Steve was and no memory of himself. _His_ sacrifice had been for nothing.

Steve hadn't realized how okay he could be with his best friend's death until it became the better option. Because the Winter Soldier? He wasn't Bucky. He could learn to approximate Bucky, to become his own person who may or may not be like the James Barnes that Steve grew up with, but he would never be the same. Not really. Not after 70 years under HYDRA's bloody thumb.

Does Steve hate himself for thinking this? Yes. Does it change anything? No.

But he could have learned to live with it. Like having all of his friends dead, like seeing the world move on, he could duck, and cover, and then stand, and pretend. Play that everything was fine, and that his smile is real. He has always been good at it.

But then Jefferson, with his doppelgänger face and his empty promises, came back. With his stupid scarves and wicked scar, and his half-assed offer to 'make things right.'

Fuck.

Steve grits his teeth and lashes out at the punching bag. It buckles under his fist, bouncing on its chain and threatening to burst like the two lying off at the side of the gym where he'd pitched them earlier. He knows he can dig out the reinforced bags, but he's too angry to take the time to.

As the bag swings back, Steve shifts and front kicks it for all he's worth (which is quite a lot, all considered). The bag goes flying, spraying sand everywhere; its hook rips out of the ceiling, trails after it, and gouges a hole in the wooden floor when it lands.

He stands for a moment, breathing. It's rare that he feels like this – and it was never this bad until the train, but right now...right now all he wants to do fight – until the anger is gone and he can't stand up and he can't see past the blood in his eyes. No, he thinks, it's more that he wants to get hurt. He wants to hurt so badly on the outside that he can't feel what's happening on the inside. It's a confusing feeling, and so difficult to indulge without sounding insane.

Maybe he will get the reinforced bags. Natasha can't spar; she's keeping an eye on Buck- on the Winter- on Bucky for him. Bruce isn't at the Tower, and Steve couldn't ask him to Hulk out for something so trivial. Clint, well, Steve actually isn't too sure where he is- Brazil, possibly. Thor is in Asgard. And Tony's on a business trip, though JARVIS might be willing to commandeer a suit if he asks nicely.

He won't.

This is his problem.

He'll deal with it.

He turns his brain off, and throws punches until his knuckles bleed.

_**  
**_

 

He's been awake for an hour and a half when JARVIS tells him that the portal jumper is back. Steve takes his eyes off the ceiling and the half-vision of Peggy Carter (she'd been left in the past, made a life for herself –she'd tell him to stay in the life he was making here...if she could remember what she was saying long enough to get the words out) to look at the clock on his bedside table.

3:00 a.m.

It's been twelve hours since the portal jumper ran off again. He considers it something of a miracle that the man's back so quickly this time, but mostly it's a disaster. It's too soon; he hasn't made up his mind. Stay in the past (so many people will die if he isn't here to help stop Loki), or bring Bucky to the future (and rip him away from everything he knows)...?

He needs more time.

But if he asks for more time, he thinks as he rolls off his bed, he'll forfeit his chance. For whatever reason, Jefferson is making this deal but it's clear he doesn't want to. If he pushes too hard the portal jumper will walk away and he'll have to learn to live with everything again.

Steve unhurriedly dons his newest tac suit (dark blue, darker red accents, a silver star on the chest –he doesn't like it), and lifts his shield over his head, fitting it to the magnetic clamps on his shoulders. He has the length of an elevator ride now to make a decision, or he could use the stairs to buy more time.

He takes the elevator.

JARVIS opens the gates on the unfinished level and wishes him good luck.

Steve just grunts and steps out amongst the piles of construction materials. He hasn't been up here in a long time, even before Tony and a wayward HAMMER drone blew it up (there's too many bad memories).

He's made up his mind.

If an exchange needs to be made every time someone goes through the portal, then he can't stay in the past without condemning someone else to go to the future. Jefferson was going to come back with someone to stay in Avenger's Tower temporarily but if Steve can get him to find one more person, then he can grab Buck before the Red Room erases him and they can both go to a new…a new future.

Dread trickles cold and deep in his center.

If Bucky doesn't become the Winter Soldier, how does the future change? Will the person (people) that Jefferson brings over just stop existing?

He can't do this.

Yes, he wants his best friend back. But if it means ending the lives of two innocent people, well, he doesn't think he can do that. He's just not that selfish (and damned if he doesn't wish that just this time, he could be). He can't stay in the past, and he can't bring Bucky to the future either.

Steve steels himself and heads for the door (it looks odd, out of place, standing there attached to nothing and covered in stickers Tony hasn't replicated in years). He's going to tell Jefferson to go home. He needs to have trust in Bucky that he can overcome the Soldier's conditioning. The price of tampering is too high.

Steve knocks on the door.

It opens mechanically, swinging too easily inward and revealing a grand, open room on the other side. Cool, dark tiles shot through with lines and swirls of gold make up the floor. In the backdrop, red silk walls stretch up and up until they fade into purple smoke. Around the circular room, spaced evenly apart, a dozen doors stand one after another, each a different colour and an entirely different style from the last. Each, Steve has to assume, leading to a different world. He wishes he was here under different circumstances so that he could appreciate it.

Steve was told he needed to have someone else exit the portal before he could enter, but he reaches an arm through his doorframe, testing, and finds that it goes through. He steps into the room as easily as he would walk through any other door. It would seem Jefferson lied again. Steve hates him just a little bit more.

He glances around and sees only the portal jumper and his little girl in the vast, empty room. They're sitting cross legged on the floor, shoulder to shoulder, facing off to the left.

"What about Monster's Inc.?" Grace's voice echoes over to him. He follows her finger to the flower-dotted white door at his 9 o'clock.

"I haven't seen that one. But I did say 'infinite worlds,' Gracie! Do you know what 'infinite' means?" Jefferson nudges his daughter with his shoulder, playfully trying to knock her off balance.

"I know what 'infinite' means!" is the indignant rebuttal. Grace shoves back, harder, and Jefferson has to catch himself with one hand even though he's laughing.

Steve feels a spike of jealousy stab low in his gut. He knows he should be happy that they found each other again after their curse, but he can't help but be resentful that his universe wasn't equally as kind to him. But that's why the Hatter's here. That's the temptation he can't give in to, not if it means sacrificing someone else.

He takes a deep breath, smooths his features into neutrality, and walks forward. His steps echo under the weight of heavy boots to give him away, and father and daughter snap their heads around to look at him. Grace's face lights up and she jumps to her feet.

"Captain America!"

"Uh, hi." He offers her a weak smile and it's all he can manage, but he's good at pretending to be fine.

Jefferson follows slower than his daughter, looking only marginally happier than Steve. "Captain," he says in lieu of a greeting.

"Hatter," Steve returns. His voice is frostier than he meant it to be in front of the girl.

Grace looks between the two men, seems to recognize the tension. "I'm going to read my book, Papa."

Jefferson smiles weakly at her until she turns away and heads for the center of the room.

Steve gets right to the point. "You said you needed someone to bring to my world before I could get in here."

"I said if you wanted to go through the hat you needed the same number of people to go in and out. While you're in here the doors are closed. You can't go anywhere except backwards."

Steve makes a show of looking around, raising his hands in a wide, exaggerated shrug. It doesn't matter that he doesn't plan on following through with the deal. He's pissed at the very thought that this guy exists, and the fact that he's lied to him again has only made him feel it. "I don't see anyone else."

Jefferson frowns. "Rumplestiltskin was...generous," is all he says.

Steve takes just long enough to recall the Grimm tale and process the fact that Rumplestiltskin is real too, before he asks, "Generous?"

"Once upon a time," the portal jumper narrates sarcastically, "before Jiminy was a cricket, he made a deal with Dark One and got Geppetto's mother and father turned into puppets. Puppets that I now have."

"Puppets." Jiminy Cricket had turned people into puppets. If Steve ever has children (he won't) he's decided he's not going to read them fairy tales (or Lewis Carroll). "No."

"No? They'll count as people to the hat-"

"Exactly. I'm going to the past and, if I change something, they'll stop existing. I can't do that. Deal's off."

Jefferson shakes his head, smiling briefly. "No, it isn't. They're firewood, Captain, piles of useless sticks. If anything, you'd be putting them out of their misery. But I thought this was what you wanted? You're the one who asked for the deal in the first place."

He does want it. More than anything. Steve is stuck between times – the past where he grew up and belongs, or the future where he is needed and has been left to carve a space…

But he doesn't have to be stuck alone. They won World War 2 without him, the world came out alright. He knows that. He also knows that Bucky doesn't, and that that is something he can fix. With firewood, not people.

Steve sounds defeated when he says, "Show me."

Jefferson snaps and dust sparkles on his fingers. A picnic basket appears at his feet with a small puff of purple smoke. Steve raises his eyebrows but makes no comment –he lives with four show-offs, knows better than to point it out. (There's also the fact that he can't bring himself to care right now).

"There's one for each of you," the portal jumper says, crouching down and pulling out a tattered wooden doll. He offers it to Steve, who takes it gingerly.

This used to be a person. It's a horrible-looking thing, old and dusty. Its clothes are ratty and faded, and its round, wooden face has been painted with a scream. He knows it wasn't paint that formed her lips, not really. It makes him sick.

Jefferson brings out a second doll, a male (a matching pair, a husband for the wife) and stands back up. He doesn't give this one to Steve, just straightens its vest and says,

"Try not to come back under fire. If you're bringing your friend back, then we need to exchange him for the other puppet. It'll be easier if you're not dodging bullets at the same time."

Steve wonders why he can't just take the second puppet with him now, but before he can ask it crosses his mind that it might not be a good idea to leave the door open for HYDRA to hop universes. So instead he asks, "You're not coming?"

Jefferson's face pinches with distress. "And take Grace into a war?" He shakes his head. "No. She stays here, and I'm not leaving her again. We won't be able to leave the hat until it's balanced again, so if you're worried about us leaving you, stop. It's stupid."

Steve glares, but considers it –considers the portal-jumper running again while Steve's on the wrong side of the portal (Hat? Is that short for something?). If the bastard leaves him...well, he thinks maybe he could live with that.

"Fine," he says. "How do I do this?" He doubts 'abracadabra' is going to work.

Jefferson eyes him for a second, then stiffly gestures with his free hand to the door Steve came through. "You'll need to concentrate. Focus on the time and place you want to be, and the portal will open there."

Steve turns, eyes the stickers and the thick hinges with only a hint of uncertainty (he's in a magic portal room, after all). "It's that easy?"

Jefferson huffs around a tiny grin and rubs the heel of his hands into his eyes. "It's that easy," he grumbles, and then throws his arms down to his sides, his fingers jittering against the denim of his skinny black jeans and the puppet in his other hand.

"Right," Steve says, turning away from the portal-jumper and staring hard at the door. "So, I just leave this...puppet in the Tower and the next time I open the door it's going to be a Russian base in 1945?"

He looks around, crossing his arms and pinning the other man with a glare. "If it's that easy, why haven't you done it? Gone back before the curse and stopped it? What aren't you telling me?"

The Hatter's eyebrows rise almost to his hairline. "Stop the Curse? Ha! I've had 28 years to think about this and I can tell you a hundred ways how to keep Regina from casting it, but I can't stop the Curse. The only sure way," Jefferson says, stepping into Steve's personal space and squinting up at him, "is to kill Rumplestiltskin before he becomes the Dark One. But the Dark One is half the reason I'm alive –he's half the reason Grace is alive! And what's the point...if Grace is never born?"

Steve doesn't answer. He doesn't need to. There wouldn't be a point, they both know. Just like there isn't a point to leaving Bucky to suffer for 70 years and more. Not when he can fix it.

No more stalling.

Steve steps away and heads for Tony's door, which still hangs open. He places the puppet gently so that she's resting against the steel frame, then leans back and closes the door.

"Just think of the time and the place you want to go," the portal jumper says.

1945\. Bucky fell on the 3rd of May, the Winter Soldier project file wasn't opened until the 23rd, so if he gives the Russian's three days to transport and stabilize him...

Steve repeats the date and a (vague idea of a) location in his head as he reaches for the handle, turns the lever, and swings the door open. He half expects that he'll see the unfinished floor of Stark's tower sitting beyond the threshold, the portal just another empty promise now that he's made up his mind. Instead he finds an empty, unfamiliar hallway stretching away to either side.

"Good luck!" Grace calls to him.

He waves briefly to her before locking eyes with Jefferson, who crosses his arms and says,

"Don't come back under fire."

"Don't worry," Steve says, "dodgeball was my best sport in high school."

Then he lifts his shield over his head, and steps over the threshold into the past. The door swings shut behind him with a faint scrape of metal on cement, barely noticeable, but Steve glances anxiously down either end of the vacant hallway. When none of the doors along the passage open, he picks a direction and heads right, running half-crouched and scanning for movement.

There are three doors on his side of the metal and concrete hallway, and at each one Steve pauses, listens. At each one, he peeks in the little window and then moves on. When he comes to the end of the hallway, with nowhere to go but left, he isn't sure which is more worrying: the fact that he hasn't seen anyone yet or the fact that he really wants to. The base doesn't exactly look deserted, but it's far too quiet to be active. (At least the lights are on.)

He only hopes he's got the right place. The Winter Soldier file wasn't specific on what happened between Bucky's initial recovery and the Red Room taking up Zola's drug trials. He only knows that General Vasily Karpov was the one to bring him in.

Bracing himself against the wall, Steve pokes his head around the corner, flinches back when his eyes catch movement toward the far end of the hall. Distantly, hinges squeal as a thick iron door is pulled open and closed. Steve peeks out again, then slips around the bend, glancing through the windows along the corridor as he hurries to the seemingly only occupied room in the base so far.

He stops. It's a joined room; through the window of the second door he can see grated metal flooring, the soldier from down the hall standing with his hands clasped behind his back. There's a row of straight-backed chairs tucked close to panels of switches sitting under a wide viewing window overlooking an empty, cob-webbed gallery. Two of the chairs are occupied by men in thick Soviet uniforms.

Steve hesitates just long enough to make a plan of action. Then he lifts his shield free, shoulders the door open and throws it through the doorway. He leaps after it. The Vibranium disk smashes into the legs of the first soldier's chair hard enough that the metal bends and the seat collapses, sending the man toppling to the floor. As the guard cries out loud and confused in Russian, Steve rushes forward and catches man from the hallway with an uppercut to the jaw as he turns. His head snaps to the side and the man crumples.

He's not dead, though. That's important. Steve needs to keep the changes he makes to a minimum, limit them to just taking Bucky and running. He needs to keep his (how did science fiction put it?) "temporal footprint" small, or risk collapsing the timeline. He really doesn't want to go through the process of getting used to a new future again.

The other guard is up now, his rifle drawn, and Steve only has time to snatch up and raise his shield before he fires. Bullets ricochet, pinging off the Vibranium, burrowing into the ceiling, and shattering the window panes. Steve doesn't wait for the man to empty the clip, just strikes out with his shield. Once shatters the guy's wrist. Twice collapses him to the floor.

The last man doesn't even try to shoot. He's untangled himself from his collapsed chair and is reaching for a button on the panel of his station – a button Steve can't identify but really doesn't want him to press. He pivots, grabs the man's wrist inches from the knob. He hauls him away, rips the gun out of his hand, and then shoves him to the wall.

" _Where is Sergeant Barnes?"_ he demands in Russian.

" _Captain America,"_ the man spits. _"You'll get nothing out of me!"_

" _Afraid I'm gonna have to. You right handed or left? Or should I guess?"_

The soldier blanches but his face is set, mouth a firm line as he steels himself.

Steve recalls what he told Fury, that sometimes he'd had to do things in the war that made him 'not sleep so well.'

This isn't one of those times.

This is not his war anymore.

One elbow pinning the man's right arm to his chest, Steve grabs his shaking left hand, hesitates (gives him one more chance to talk), and then punches upward. Their hands hit on the man's chin and his head snaps back into the wall. He goes limp, eyes rolling back in his head, and Steve lets him down gently.

It would have been nice, he reflects as he turns and runs from the room, for the soldier to have talked. It would have saved valuable time.

Running half-crouched again, he muses that it would also be nice if there were security cameras around. He'll have to wait a few more years for those, though. He's banking on Karpov having only a small squad of soldiers, but there's no way to check his guess except the old-fashioned way: kick down the door and follow the bursts of gunfire rebounding off the shield.

He needs to find Bucky.

There's no one in any of the rooms down the next hall, no one on the top floor excluding the three unconscious men in the viewing room. The last crook of the square-shaped base ends in an elevator and a set of stairs. He doesn't hesitate before creeping down the steps.

Hardly breathing, it isn't long before he hears faint voices and another door screeching as it opens and closes. The voices get marginally louder when the door snaps home, which means it isn't where the majority of the voices are coming from, and it means that the men either respect or fear whoever just left. Steve braces himself, knows that wherever that door leads is where Bucky is. He just has to get past the voices down the hall, then through the door, and back. All while making sure his best friend doesn't get hurt in the process. Shouldn't be too hard.

The voices lead to an old room, empty except for a dented filing cabinet and a mouldering wooden table, the latter of which has several men seated around it. He counts eight soldiers leaning back in flimsy chairs, their guns hanging off the backs or leaning against the legs of the seats.

" _But what is so important about this American? To call the General for half of a soldier-"_

" _It's none of our business, Antonoff. Just lay your card and keep your voice down."_

" _I heard the Captain mention HYDRA over the radio. He could be one of theirs. A deserter or-"_

" _Orloff! Quiet."_

" _Just play the damn game before you shits get the Nazis down on all of us,"_ a fourth voice cuts in, curt and authoritative.

Well, Steve's got two names now. This'll be fun. If he wasn't on such a strict schedule, he'd take the time to learn more.

He straightens out, back to the wall with his shield in between, and flexes his fingers.

" _Antonov!"_ he barks. _"Orloff!"_

The soldiers respond more to the tone than the voice as two chairs immediately scrape backward.

" _Sir?"_ Heavy boots clump against the concrete as the two quickly make their way into the hall.

The first man Steve sees is broad-shouldered and flat faced, and has his rifle slung over his shoulder. Steve grabs him first, swings him by his collar and off his feet.

He yelps, but is quickly silenced when Steve pulls the second man around and clunks their heads together. Dazed, eyes rolling in their sockets, they drop like sprayed bees.

" _Antonov?"_ someone in the room calls.

Steve kicks the two men around the corner and their gear scrapes on the old concrete as they skid into the room and crash into the table. Startled exclamations and the metal scratch of guns being prepped covers the sound of his footsteps and the scrape of his shield as he pulls it free and slings it into the room ahead of him.

It catches the farthest man in the chest, knocks the wind out of him with a pained huff and probably breaks a rib or two. He doubles over onto the table, onto a straight flush –the shield slips from his surprised grip and clanks to the ground.

Five men left.

Steve rolls through the doorway and under a burst of gunfire, ends his somersault with a punch to the gut of the nearest soldier, followed by a quick, hard jab to the face as the guy doubles up. Blood sprays from his nose, arcs as his head snaps up and he collapses backwards. The man behind him, wide eyed with surprise, swings the butt of his submachine gun at the intruder. Steve dodges, catches his wrist and pulls him straight into his fist.

As the soldier falls there's another gunshot –singular, from a pistol –and pain lances white-hot in his shoulder. Steve staggers as his body seizes, remembers another wound in almost the same place from not too long ago (and 70 years from now). The armour of his uniform slowed the bullet enough so it didn't have the force to punch through the other side and he can feel it burning in with splinters of shattered bone.

Wrestling his body back into his control, he drops, narrowly avoiding a more fatal injury, and kicks his legs out. The third guy drops like a precious vase, lands skull first on the stained concrete and doesn't stir.

Two men, now.

Steve, still crouched and in immediate danger of being shot again now that friendly fire is less of an issue, kicks up to knock the table sideways. It jumps, spilling playing cards as it lands on its edge and bounces closer to him with a loud bang. He strikes out again, his boot makes contact with the flat surface of the old wood and the table flies back, bowls over the two men still standing. One gun goes off as its soldier stiffens in alarm and then pain as he is pushed into the wall. The submachine gun fires twice before the man's finger relaxes – one shot hits Steve in his side, the other ricochets and disappears into the hallway.

Steve can't help the small cry of shock at the sudden pain (so familiar) and the warm, wet spread of blood under his uniform. For a minute, all he can do is breathe and bleed and shake on the ground as his body recalls trauma he can only clearly remember the aftereffects of. But Bucky isn't here to pull him out this time. This time it's Steve's turn to pull Bucky out, and to do that he needs to get himself under control.

Gritting his teeth and screwing his eyes against the agony, Steve reaches out for where his shield lays nearby. He eases to a sit, then rolls slowly to his knees and finally, carefully, holding pressure on his side with his injured arm, stumbles to his feet with the aid of his shield. He can do this.

Slow steps get him to the entrance of the little room. Slightly faster ones, braced against the wall, get him down the corridor and to the door – the door where someone respected or feared had gone through. Was it General Karpov, or the Captain the soldiers had mentioned during their card game?

It doesn't matter, except he thinks if it is Karpov, he'll kill him –which goes against his plan to leave history relatively like the way he finds it, but he doesn't think he can forgive what that man did (is doing, will do).

Either way, though he can still fight, he is definitely at a disadvantage (never stopped him before). Everyone else can and will shoot to kill and Steve only has a shield he can't throw right now and two barely working legs. But he's definitely had worse. He can make it.

Peeking through the little viewing window, Steve takes in as much as possible. Most of everything in the room is covered in dusty white sheets. What isn't is old, even by a 1940's perspective, and covered in bloody bandages, medical instruments, and scraps of an easily recognizable blue coat.

The two men inside the room (one moving about in a bloodstained lab coat, the other standing at parade rest in Captain's livery) are discussing something, the field doctor making broad gestures and shaking his head often.

Blood loss aside, Steve feels nauseous. He can't waste any more time. Bucky is _right here._

Shield held in his right hand and every ounce of stubborn willpower focused against the fuzziness at the edge of his vision, Steve heaves open the door and forces his feet to jog across the threshold.

He isn't met with angry shouts. He isn't met with the anticipated gunfire. He isn't even met with the right room. Instead, when he lifts his eyes, Steve sees Jefferson's portal room – all doors and a mirror, still with two people, but not those he expected.

He almost trips over the littler one.

"Grace?" He's trying very hard not to scream (or cry) and it comes out a gargled mess. The door swings slowly shut behind him.

The girl is standing about two feet from him, her face screwed up to stop frightened tears from spilling over.

"Please, you have to help my Papa!"

"What?" Steve lifts heavy eyes to scan the room, sees Jefferson standing paralyzed and staring blankly at a mirror that wasn't there when he left, then he looks back at Grace. "Just give me a minute. Bucky's on the other side of this door-"

"But Papa's acting weird again! Dr. Hopper says he's not safe when it happens, he told me I need to call a grown-up. Captain America, please!"

"I-!" Steve swings around on his heel, fights down the vertigo and grabs at the metal handle, pulls. The door stays stuck. "Grace, open the door."

He can hear the glare in her voice when she responds, "No."

Steve tugs the handle again, stiffens when the action pulls at his wounds. He presses down on his side, clenching his teeth at the pain. He needs to stop the bleeding. He can make it a lot farther if he has to, but the portal jumper's daughter has to let him try first.

She gasps. "You're bleeding!"

_Yes,_ he's bleeding. But worse things are happening (will happen, have happened!) to Bucky, and he can stop all of it if she just lets him.

"Papa...?"

Steve turns around, freezes as he finds himself nose to nose with Jefferson. He's pale, Steve notes, and his pupils are far too wide. Grace is right, something is wrong.

"Bleeding? Who is?" Jefferson squints. "You're bleeding."

Grace tugs on her father's jacket, Steve gently pushes against his chest with his good arm. Together, they back the Hatter up a step until Steve can breathe his own air again.

"Jefferson. I need you to open this door." Steve will help (he will!) but Bucky is his priority right now (except, maybe, for patching himself up so he **can** help Bucky).

Jefferson purses his lips, then shakes his head. Lightning quickly, he jabs out and stabs his hand into Steve's side.

Steve chokes on a scream, doubles over around renewed shockwaves of agony. Jefferson's fingers come away bloody. He rubs his thumb over the digits, smearing the blood around his hand with a considering look on his face.

"You're bleeding. Soon to be dead." He beams, spins on his heel to face his daughter. "Once that happens, you and I can paint the roses for the Queen! It's good when she's happy."

"Papa, we need to get you away from the mirror. I think it's making you worse."

"Non-sense, Alice. That would be the tea: it's awfully bitter." He turns back to the shimmering looking glass, wipes his hand on his jeans.

Maybe, Steve thinks as he carefully straightens up, leaving Grace alone with the Mad Hatter isn't the best idea. Maybe there is something in Jefferson's picnic basket he can use to tie him up while he goes back to get Buck?

"Papa, let's go back!"

"What?" Jefferson does a double take, looks away from the mirror and back to his daughter.

Steve almost drops his shield, magnetic vembraces or no. "What? No. Grace, just open the door-!"

Jefferson crosses his arms, turns up his nose and pouts. "We can't go back. The hat doesn't work. I can't get it to work, I haven't got it to work, but I will get it to work. See, I buried the latest one with a magic ring, and I'm hoping maybe a tree…"

Steve tunes him out and tries the door again. It remains firmly shut. Maybe he should tie both of them up.

"But you did get it to work! We're not in Wonderland, see?"

A stuck-out tongue is the eloquent response Grace gets to that comment. She stamps her foot in frustration. "Just try it. Pretend!"

The Hatter glances at his daughter without turning his head, staring out of the corner of his eye, sizing her up. "Fine."

"No!" Steve's protests fall on deaf ears as Jefferson closes his eyes. He pitches forward, grabbing for the heavily decorated fabric of Jefferson's shirt with intent to shake the Hatter off balance (or at least keep his own enough to talk him out of it).

He's too late. The world lurches and they all stagger. Something wraps around Steve's middle, lacing in between his organs, and yanks him upwards. Somehow, he leaves his stomach behind despite it. The Room blurs into a smear of red and purple as he flies up, then there's a flash of light.

He catches a glimpse of bone-white carpet and a matching couch before something slams into his injured side, his head hits glass, and he passes out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many, many thanks to emilyhotchner-olicity-bethyl for your continued faith in me, and to leiutos for being the only person to comment.


	6. Mind Your Research

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: Liberal use of aliases.

_**8:15 a.m.** _

The ride through the hat is not a pleasant one. It's long and rough and makes them all seasick as Grace fights against her Papa to control their destination.

Home, to him, means the Enchanted Forest. But there's nothing there anymore except an empty cottage, all weathered and falling apart. They can't go back there now, as much as they both want to see _home_ again.

Paige guides the portal to Storybrooke. She aims for the hospital, but she's not sure if the hat can do that. She's not even sure if she knows how to work the hat or why it would listen to her, but she knows she has to try.

In a flash of light, Grace is spit out of a swirling purple vortex. Her feet hit shiny tiles at an awkward angle and she trips, goes skidding onto a cold linoleum floor with an _"oof."_ Blearily, she looks around.

Bright sunlight floods a wide room through large picture windows. The tiles on the floor are pale grey and stretch uniformly from one seafoam green wall to another, and trail down an off-shooting hallway. A trio of white couches surrounds a small carpeted area with a glass coffee table, the only fixtures besides a forest painting and the two potted ferns by the double doors that lead outside.

It's a familiar room. She remembers coming in when she was six, after she fell out of a tree and broke her arm (except that didn't really happen). More recently, she remembers that the Storybrooke General Hospital is one of the first places she went to look for her Papa when the curse broke.

"Ha, it worked!"

The Hatter is on his lying on his back next to her. There's dust on his jacket where he too slid across the floor, though he doesn't seem to care. He gestures to the ceiling panels, then the glass doors through which they can see sluggish morning traffic driving. Waving his arms around like that, he looks like an overturned tortoise.

Papa looks over at her, his grin wide but slipping, and then he flinches, like someone invisible slapped him. He frowns at her, red-stained fingers reaching under a silver and grey scarf to feel at hard, raised skin. Whispers, "Why did it work?"

Before she can answer, someone gasps behind her, the hiss of a person in pain drawing breath. Grace pulls herself up, her palms squealing against the flooring. From her knees, she turns around to find Captain America still on his feet, standing in front of the beach ball-sized portal and pressing a hand hard over his side. Blood sneaks between his fingers and drips to the floor. He looks like he's about to be sick. She needs to get him help.

As she gets to her feet, the shrinking whirlwind spits out one last thing. Almost like an afterthought, the picnic basket carrying her book and the creepy puppet pops out of the wormhole and slams right into the exit wound in Captain America's side. He lurches forward with a wheeze and his knee gives out. His head knocks against the glass table as he falls, and then he doesn't move.

Someone shrieks before Grace can, and it startles her so much she forgets she was going to scream too. She looks around to see Cinderella and her baby on the threshold of the hallway. One of Ashley's hands is over her mouth.

"Oh, my-!" A woman Grace doesn't know is standing behind the reception desk, staring wide-eyed at the sudden drop-ins in her foyer. She reaches for a phone on the tabletop, presses a button, and then her voice issues calm and precise from a loudspeaker,

"Code Blue in reception. Dr. Whale, Code Blue."

The receptionist replaces the phone and hurries toward them. Grace picks up the picnic basket and moves it to the nearest couch so it's out of the way, then she snatches the hat off the floor and backs up to stand next to her Papa. The nametag pinned to a pink flowery blouse reads _'Nettie_ ,' she sees, as the woman drops to her knees and puts her head close to Captain America's to check his breathing. Her hands flutter over him like she wants to turn him over but isn't sure she should.

Cinderella scurries over to them as a pair of nurses rush in with a stretcher. She takes a long look at Jefferson, who stares down at Captain America and the nurses with glazed eyes, before grabbing Paige's hand in hers. She gently tugs the young girl out of the way, and Grace flips the Hat onto her head so her hand is free to grab her Papa's and drag him along with them. He doesn't seem to notice that he's moving.

Ashley stops at the front door, deliberately remains facing away from the scene behind them. Shifting her baby into both hands, she looks down at Grace who has to tip her head way back to see around the hat's wide brim.

"Paige, are you okay?" Ashley glances from her to the unresponsive Hatter, and Grace sees her eyes flick down look at the blood on his hand.

"Yes," Grace tells her. She feels kind of watery, not just in her eyes but in her legs, and she doesn't like the feeling at all. But Captain America is hurt and her Papa is…not feeling well, so she has to be strong. She got Captain America to people who could help, now she needs to see about Papa.

"Can you call Dr. Hopper for me?"

 

_**9:08 a.m.** _

Emma gets the call from the hospital at the same exact moment she sits down at Mary Margaret's kitchen table for a nice breakfast of crispy toast and cinnamon-sprinkled hot chocolate.

She picks up her cell phone almost one hour after Archie Hopper fumbled open his own, and an hour and five minutes after Victor Whale answered his page from the hospital break room.

Caller ID tells her it's the hospital's recovery room. Frowning, Emma swipes to answer.

"Hello?"

" _Mom!"_

"Henry?!" Heart beating quite suddenly in her throat, she does her best to sound calm but _her son_ is calling from the _hospital_. Anxiety carries her voice to a higher pitch and her mind down a steep track to the incident with the apple turnover. How bad is he hurt? How did it happen and when? Why isn't one of the doctors calling her instead? Regina has legal custody of Henry, she should be getting this call –unless she already had and Henry was going behind her back to let Emma know.

" _You're not gonna believe it! Captain America is here! I mean, he's kind of unconscious so I haven't really got to meet him, but there's a real live superhero in Storybrooke! How cool is that?"_

"…What?" That is officially the last thing she expected to hear. Does Henry have a concussion? Captain America is definitely not a fairy tale character. He's not even a literary one. He's a frigging comic book, he can't possibly be actually here. Except…

She vaguely recalls Henry ambushing her last week with a very colourful signed poster and tales of Grace going through the Hatter's portal to meet the Avengers. But visiting and bringing guests back are two completely different stories. And doesn't the hat need someone to trade off when travelling between worlds? If Jefferson kidnapped someone else, she's going to lock up all his hatting supplies somewhere and lose the memory of where she put them. She thought he was over this.

But why is Captain America unconscious in the hospital? She hopes, as she presses the phone between her chin and shoulder and snatches up her car keys, that it wasn't anything he had to drink.

 

_**10:43 a.m.** _

Steve Rogers wakes up slowly. He does not wake up happy.

He wakes up wrapped in gauze, with a pounding head and a dry mouth. He wakes up in a hospital. Again.

There are wires in his arm attached to an IV, a plastic medical bracelet on his wrist. His shoulder feels three times too thick when he probes the area with his other hand.

He remembers taking the bullets, remembers finding the operating theatre, but he can't recall – and he looks to either side to make sure – actually finding Bucky.

There's only one other person in the wide, sterile, sunlit room with him. It's not Bucky. It's not even Jefferson.

There's a blond man in a white lab coat standing just inside the glass door of a glass wall, writing something on a clipboard, his feet spread like he was in the middle of walking when got caught up in his notes. He looks up when Steve rustles the sheets.

"Hello." The man lowers his clipboard, straightens his coat, and strolls over to Steve's bed. "Glad to see you're awake. I'm Doctor Whale, Chief Medical Surgeon."

Aw, shit. Natasha's words about Dr. Frankenstein working at the Storybrooke hospital rise up to haunt him. He really hopes his arm feels weird because of the drugs, not because it's a transplant.

"Steve," Steve says. And then, "I need to go."

He flips the thin white blanket off and tries to roll out of the bed. He needs to find the portal jumper, needs to find Bucky. Except rolling on his shoulder puts pressure on his gut wound and he falls back with a hiss.

"You're not going anywhere! Not yet. I have some questions. On a scale of one to ten, rate your pain level for me, Steve."

"About a four." Whatever they'd given him was SHIELD pharmaceutical strength, a little unexpected.

Dr. Whale puts a light hand on his good shoulder as if to hold him down, glances at the clipboard again. "Now, Paige told me that you were shot a few hours ago, but the degree of healing in your wounds suggests that they're several days old at least. Would you like to explain?"

Steve recognizes the demand, dismisses it. "Who's Paige?"

Whale's face goes flat with annoyance. "Grace," he clarifies.

"Oh." Right. Curse lives.

When Whale shifts his stance, and raises his eyebrows at him, Steve says with false nonchalance, "I heal fast."

Whale sighs, makes a note on his clipboard, and mutters something about needing a drink.

 

_**11:02 a.m.** _

"So?" Emma asks, hopping to her feet when Victor Whale finally walks back into the waiting area where she and Henry have been arguing comic books for the last one and a half hours.

"I'm gonna have to go with Henry on this one, Sheriff. I could see advanced signs of healing when we went for the bullet in his scapula, which means either Paige was lying about when he was shot or he has enhanced recuperative abilities. He told me his name is Steve, and he _was_ wearing that shield."

The doctor points to the heavy, paint-chipped metal disk currently being toted around the room by her son.

"No, that's not what I- Well, it _is,_ but- I mean, did he say anything about being kidnapped?" Emma really doesn't want to hear a yes to that question, and she shifts nervously to her other foot as she asks it.

"Oh, no. He came voluntarily. Jefferson owed him a favour."

"The Hell kind of favour would that be? _He_ gets shot and Jefferson comes back like he was mind-whammied by Lewis Carroll? Look, I just want to know what happened and if I even need to be here! (Where are my deputies?) Which room is he in again?"

Whale shrugs. "I'm afraid I can't allow visitors right now. Because he was brought in in such an emergency, we don't have any baseline vitals or medical history. I want him monitored for a while to see if any complications develop, and _then_ you may interrogate him. Besides, he needs to rest."

Emma slumps, a pout pulling her already downturned lips even further. "Great. Maybe I can go talk to the Bakers again, see if they'll recant that refusal to let me question Grace."

"She's not hurt physically, but she is a little traumatized. You may want to take it easy on her."

Emma groans but nods, and thinks longingly of the hot chocolate sitting abandoned on her counter. She wishes the universe would take it easy on her just once.

"This was supposed to be my day off," she sighs as wheels around and heads for the elevator.

 

_**12:21 p.m.** _

Restless energy twitches through his limbs like ants. It hasn't even been a full day in another universe (not even a few hours, really) and Steve has decided he can't take it anymore.

The bed is like cushioned cement, not sharp but unyielding as holds him. It figures that one of the constants between universes would be the absolute discomfort of laying on a hospital bed.

And the room! It's a private room, but regardless, he hasn't met many with wallpaper this carefully chosen. Even Tony's tower's infirmary is more stark than this. Rich cream paint sits thick over the bottom half of each wall and a wooden border separates it from, of all things, a perimeter of birch trees. He hadn't had much of a problem with the trees until he found himself trying to count them out.

After the initial post-surgery checks, nobody has been in to see him and he finds himself a little stir-crazed for want of company or at least an update. The trip through the portal gets a little hazy in his memory after the initial rollercoaster pitch and he can't remember landing. He doesn't know where Jefferson and his daughter are, doesn't know how Mad the Hatter is at the moment. He only knows that he's in Storybrooke, he's been patched up, and Frankenstein is his doctor. Oh, and he failed to rescue Bucky.

Letting his head sink into the flat pillow he's propped against, Steve sighs and deliberates pushing the nurse call button to ask for a magazine ( _anything!_ ) to distract himself. He's not built for waiting around, has already spent too much time brooding lately, so he packs up the guilt and despair and self-hate into a little ball and shoves it down to the bottom of what Sam calls his emotional man-purse. And he gets off the bed.

It's slow going, each movement testing to see what hurts and what doesn't, but eventually he's upright and shuffling with his IV-stand to the door. His right leg doesn't feel real and Steve can't tell if it's a result of the gunshot wound or the elephant's dose of painkillers, but his unreal leg supports him through the journey so he doesn't worry too much about it.

Steve opens the white door and nearly trips over a small person standing with their arm raised to knock. He looks like a young boy, maybe 10, maybe 12, but this is a land of fairy tales and Steve will take nothing at face value. For all he knows, this boy is Peter Pan, 200 years older than him and capable of powerless flight.

"Um," he says.

"Oh." The boy straightens up, hitches his backpack higher up his shoulder, and blinks up at Steve. "Hi. I'm Henry. Do you mind if I come in? I have something you need to see."

Steve considers it for a moment (ponders who in the wide range of fairy tales from around the globe was named Henry), then shrugs with his working shoulder and steps back to let the kid in. He may have only an arm and a leg right now but he is not defenseless.

Company is much better than a magazine anyway, he decides, as the kid pulls the visitor's chair next to the nightstand and plops himself down. He watches Steve's slow walk back across the room, waits until he gets himself sitting down on the raised bed, and then drags his backpack up onto his knees.

"You're really Captain America, aren't you. Grace said she went to Earth-616 last week. This so cool!"

"Earth-616?" Steve recalls Jefferson's nudge to Grace about his portal having access to an infinite number of worlds, and he has time to wonder if the portal jumper really went through the trouble of numbering them before Henry answers,

"It's what Marvel Comics calls their main storyline. I _guess_ since your world is real it would be the main timeline."

"I guess so," Steve concedes. Main timeline. The kid says it with so much ease, like he's still talking about a story even though one of the characters is sitting right next to him. Steve supposes he can't hold it against him: Henry looks to be barely a teenager. To ask him to understand the enormity of a world safely fictional suddenly becoming reality might be a bit much.

"You said you had something I needed to see?" Steve prompts.

"Oh yeah! But first-" He unbuckles a flap on his backpack, roots through it until he pulls out something colourful, square, and sheathed in plastic. "Check it out!"

He holds out whatever it is and Steve takes it with his available right hand. He casts an inquisitive look at the beaming boy before examining whatever it is he's been given.

It's a comic book, styled in much the same way as some of Coulson's trading cards had been. A yellow sky contrasts with the darker greens and purples of a city street filled with attacking baddies and fleeing civilians. A very large Captain America is fighting (and beating) a much smaller Captain America. The cover promises 'star-spangled action' inside and Steve silently vows to never let Tony or Clint find out about that sentence.

" _Captain America and the Falcon_. This looks…exciting." As weird as it is to find himself on the cover of a comic book, Steve finds he is actually quite interested in reading it. The art style is attractive and the colouring refreshing, wonderfully bright compared to the desaturated films and covers that are so popular in his new time.

"I can read this?" he asks, looking to Henry for confirmation.

"Uh-huh. It's not the first issue," he warns, "but it's the oldest one I have."

Noting the puff of pride in the kid's chest at the last, Steve promises, "I'll be careful with it."

He nudges a half-empty water glass aside and sets the comic gently on the nightstand. "Thank you for this, Henry."

Henry beams. Then his smile fades.

"How did you get shot?" he asks, boldly staring Steve in the eyes. "And what were you doing with the Mad Hatter?"

Suddenly exhausted, Steve lets his head sink into the pillow. So this is why the boy is here, he muses. He dodges one police interrogation by playing up his medication only to land in another from a seemingly more innocent source. Maybe Henry isn't Peter Pan, but he's wily.

"Kid, that's none of your business."

Henry bristles. It's one thing to recognize that adults usually call him 'kid' to dismiss him, another to hear it from _Captain America._ "I think it is! It's like with my story book. I have access to the history and possibly the future of your universe! I can help!"

The comics, Steve realizes with a jolt. This is no thing to be asking a preteen, but it's true that Henry could be a valuable resource with his comic collection. He could have access to secrets that Steve would never be able to lay eyes on otherwise. Like the exact coordinates of Bucky's fall, HYDRA bases, the Red Room…

"The first time I met Jefferson," Steve says slowly, "he told me that his portal could travel through time and I realized I could save Bucky."

Henry purses his lips. "…You know he's still alive?"

Steve nods solemnly.

"He'll be okay, y'know. He gets better."

Steve huffs a quiet laugh entirely devoid of humour, shakes his head. "That's not the point. The Red Room and HYDRA…they had him for 70 years. I can't let him go through that, not if I can help it."

"Bad things usually happen in comics when people mess with time. They make things worse. Or they make the bad thing happen that they were trying to stop."

"I can't let him go through that," Steve says again. His whole body tenses, pulling at his still-healing wounds, as he thinks about willingly leaving Bucky to be torn apart, mind and body, over and over for something as trivial as a plot line. "Not when I know about it. Not when I can stop it."

"But if you take Bucky, who becomes the Winter Soldier?"

 

_**9:43 a.m.** _

This is not the first time Archie has been called in to deal with a nonresponsive patient. It's not the first time Jefferson has been that patient, either. There have been two incidents since the curse broke that Archie knows about, probably more during the 28 years the man was awake during it. Both times (and now) had been the result of sudden and severe emotional distress.

Jefferson's official patient file labels him with dissociative disorder – it used to say schizophrenia with fantasy delusions, but Archie crossed that out a few days after the curse broke. (The unofficial file has theories of magic and how the overwhelming senselessness of Wonderland may have bled into the man's desperation to drive him out of his mind.)

There's not much Archie can do during these periods but wait. Jefferson will come back when he's ready.

Getting the Hatter to his office is not difficult. He doesn't respond to his name, and only has a minimal reaction to outside stimuli, but he follows some basic commands if they are accompanied by appropriate physical prompts.

"Sit," Archie tells him gently, holding his car door open with one hand and guiding the man into the seat with the other. He sits, and Archie drives them up to the main street.

"Hold this," Archie tells him, and presses a cup of warm tea into his hands. Cold, clean fingers wrap around the mug, and then they sit.

Archie works on filing records and typing up session notes on his computer, checking on the Hatter every five minutes by a light touch on the shoulder and quietly but firmly calling his name.

One full lap of the clock by the minute hand, and Archie is out of notes. He's not expecting any patients until 11:30, roughly half an hour away; he'd cleared his morning after Ashley's call from the hospital.

The tea in Jefferson's hands is untouched and long cold, the dark surface reflecting distant eyes that gaze at something Archie will never see. He'll have to dump it out. The Hatter can't stay in the office much longer, and if Archie wants to get him somewhere safe (the hospital) and get back in time for his next appointment, he'll have to leave soon.

The conscience-turned-therapist takes a moment to massage the ridge of his nose where his gold-rimmed glasses dig in, and then stands. He leaves his desk, chair out, and rounds the couch.

Jefferson flinches the moment Archie's hand brushes his shoulder, and he barely grabs the cup and saucer as the Hatter swings them at him. Some tea slops over the side and onto the carpet, but at least it isn't all over his favourite jacket. Archie holds up his free hand, fingers splayed and palm toward his patient to indicate goodwill.

"Jefferson, it's Dr. Hopper. You're in my office. You're safe here."

Wild eyes take a moment to focus and then the arm raised for defense drops. Jefferson slumps into the cushions and closes his eyes.

Archie sets the teacup and its saucer on the coffee table and edges over until he can ease into the armchair he's turned perpendicular to the couch for his sessions.

"Tell me what happened," the cricket says.

"I saw the mirror and I got lost." Jefferson runs a clawed hand through his hair, pulling at it roughly until it takes its usual haphazard arrangement. He seems momentarily baffled when his fingers fall free as early as they do, before he rolls his eyes at himself and puts his hands on his knees. "It was like I had never left. I was trying to find a way home, and then…I called her Alice," he says with dawning horror. "I called her Alice. I didn't recognize _Grace!"_

He swivels to face Archie, "How could I not recognize my daughter?"

The conscience takes a deep breath, calling forth all the memories of seminars he never attended and books he never read (but certificates for which hang on his walls and volumes take up his bookshelves). This is going to be a long and difficult conversation, but it's also overdue and the man in front of him is finally ready to listen.

Archie leans forward, threads his fingers together, and starts talking.

 

_**12:41 p.m.** _

Neither of them speaks for a short while.

Steve's mind is reeling anew at the question of what HYDRA will try without Bucky to become their Winter Soldier.

Will they continue with the program? He has little doubt they will, ambitious as they are. There's nothing quite like a living weapon with no will of its own beyond your commands, as he and half of the Avengers are well aware.

So, if HYDRA or the Red Room pull some random person off the battlefield or the street to turn into their new Soldier (someone just like Buck or Natasha), could he live with that? Could he be that selfish?

His gut answer is yes. There is nothing he will not do for James Barnes. And he certainly can't fix all the world's problems by himself, not all at once. Maybe – _maybe_ – when he gets Bucky back safe, he can negotiate with the Hatter and travel back one more time, cut HYDRA off once and for all.

So, his new question is: how can he do what he needs to do _and_ avoid making things worse? He just wants to save his friend, why is it so complicated?

While Steve ruminates on his question, Henry stares at the superhero. He watches the way his face scrunches up and his lips purse every now and then as he thinks it over. Henry looks at the shield leaning on the wall by the door, the chips in the paint where bullets tore through blue and red to the bright, polished Vibranium underneath.

He thinks about Emma and how much convincing it took to get her to a point where she could break the curse, about how many ruts she'd dug herself into in denying the reality of magic. He thinks about the rooms full of hats in Grace's second house, and the curse that brought the town to life. He knows what it looks like when someone gets stuck.

He digs around in his backpack and draws out the _Once Upon a Time_ book. With both hands on the cover, he slams it down next to Steve's leg on the hard bed.

The older man only looks at him with tired eyes.

Henry says, "I figured out that everyone here was really from a fairy tale. And I helped Emma break the curse with Operation Cobra."

He sees no reason to tell Captain America that he'd pretty much bit the apple-flavoured dust in order to do so, not when he'd had all the faith in the world(s) that Emma would wake him up.

"So I have some experience with planning things. But you're Steve Rogers! You're Captain America!" he all but shouts. "You're the greatest strategist in the Marvel universe. If anyone can do this, you can! You found Bucky before and you can find him again. You just need to _believe_. Let me help you."

Steve's brows are halfway to his hairline, head tilted as he considers the kid across the table from him. The cynical part of his mind dismisses him as immature and possibly a nuisance. The other part slowly starts to realize he's right. Maybe not about believing –it hasn't helped much before –but that he will get Bucky back.

It isn't that he'd given up – rather that he'd stalled like an old manual transmission. Gotten too caught up in the details. It isn't his job to make sure that the planet is safe for everyone. He just wants to protect the few people he loves and he can't do that by moping in a hospital in another universe.

"Alright Henry," he says. "What do you suggest I do?"

He can all but see the kid crack his knuckles as he leans forward. As he outlines a plan he has obviously spent a lot of time on, Steve can't help but marvel at by how wide a margin it was that he had missed the obvious in his earlier rescue attempt. Ignoring the differences between the comics and his own reality (Zemo's rocket instead of Zola's train- he wonders who Zemo is), he has to admit that Henry's plan is solid.

He tells the kid so and worries for a minute that he's given him an aneurysm.

 

_**2:00 p.m.** _

When Emma finally gets in to see the town's newest visitor, she isn't as surprised as she thinks she should be to see Henry is already there. Her kid has a knack for getting in where he shouldn't and being in the wrong places at the right time. He told her once that that was a real superpower. Synchronicity something or other. She called it, with fondness and a little anxiety, being nosy.

Knocking on the open door of the private room, she listens as a lecture about how all of their fairy tales are intertwined cuts off.

"Hello?" comes a voice she's never heard before.

Emma steps into the room, immediately assessing the blond man seated on the bed – wide shoulders, nice face – before turning to her son.

"Henry, time to go," she says, gesturing to the hallway with her head.

"Aww," he moans. "Can't I stay for a few more minutes?"

She smiles, ducking her head, suddenly overcome with affection. Then she collects herself and manages a stern, "Henry. Mary Margaret's in the waiting room, she's going to take you home."

Pouting, he buckles up his backpack, but leaves the open fairy tale book on the bed. He leans in to whisper something into the man's ear (Steve nods at whatever it is), before pushing the visitor's chair back where he found it and passing Emma out the door. She ruffles his hair as he walks by her and sends him giggling on his way.

Then she enters the room herself.

"I'm Emma Swan," she introduces herself, coming to stand at the foot of his bed. "I'm the sheriff." She leans her weight on one leg and rests her hands on her hips, which has the unintended side effect of exposing the gold badge on her belt.

"Steve Rogers," the man says back.

She can't help herself. "So, you're really Captain America?"

"Your doctor's really Frankenstein?" he shoots back. He can't let it go; every time he thinks about it, he grows more baffled at the town's choice to let this man, who digs up dead bodies and doesn't even have a Ph.D., practice medicine in their only hospital.

"Uh, yeah." At least the sheriff looks uneasy about it too. "Dr. Whale's gonna be in here in a minute to discharge you, but he's concerned that you don't have coverage since, well…"

"Yeah." Steve's thought about that too. Being from another universe, his Avenger's insurance wouldn't exactly extend here. And he isn't in the habit of carrying his wallet on missions either. "I don't have a good answer for that."

Emma purses her lips. She expected nothing else. The suit that Cap had been wearing (what she'd seen after Whale's nurses had cut it off him) hadn't had a lot of pockets. And his Han Solo-esque utility belt (now hanging out in the back seat of her cruiser) was otherwise occupied by an ID card, communicator, and little round things she assumed were smoke or flash bombs only because of cartoons. She hadn't spent much time poking at those.

"He's willing to give you a few days to sort it out. Jefferson can take you to your world and bring you back here, if you need."

Steve is too tired to snort, but he doubts the portal jumper would appreciate becoming a ferry service. Sheriff Swan would have to give him an official order.

"How's he doing?"

"He'll be alright. This isn't the first time something like this has happened. Listen, about tonight, you have a few choices. You can take a room at Granny's Bed and Breakfast. The rates are pretty good and her lasagna is heavenly, but you don't have any money, so…"

Steve nods at her to continue.

"Or you can bunk with Jefferson. He's got… _a lot_ of free space. He's not happy, but he offered and he won't charge you."

"Thanks."

She offers to drive him over and Steve accepts. He has no idea where the portal jumper lives and no way to get there in any significant time with his injuries.

When Whale shows up, he brings with him a pair of scrubs dug up from the locker's lost and found. He tells Steve that he's okay to leave and that the receptionist has paperwork ready for him at the desk by the elevators.

Steve changes in silence while the sheriff and the doctor wait in the hallway. They accompany him to reception, Whale watching him carefully the whole way before the doctor excuses himself to go back to his rounds.

At street level, Emma thanks her lucky stars that she hadn't driven her Beetle today; there's no way Captain America would have fit comfortably in there. As it is, he squeezes carefully into the front seat of Storybrooke's only police cruiser with Henry's book and a comic on his lap, and moves the seat back until he can stretch his aching leg out.

He looks out the window and watches the town as Emma drives through it. Both parties are quiet in the uneasy-comfortable way of two strangers sitting in close quarters together, and neither wants to break it with awkward small talk. Steve is content to watch the buildings glide by, the people on the streets, the small-town scene. He is a little disappointed at how mundane it all looks, indistinguishable from any other small town he's been to. He was hoping to see something…fairy tale.

Although, when they pull up to the big blue house on the hill that he can only assume belongs to the Hatter, he has to admit that this place, at least, is a little enchanting. It looks like an old hotel refurbished for permanent occupancy. There are plenty of windows, lots of wrought iron fencing, and a minimally maintained garden. Moss grows green on a second-floor porch that overlooks the surrounding forest, and Steve promises himself he'll spend time up there.

"You weren't exaggerating when you said he had plenty of space."

"Yep."

The sheriff doesn't comment further, though it looks like she wants to, and parks the car at the front steps. "You need help getting out?"

"I can manage," Steve says, unbuckling his seat belt and pulling on the door handle.

The white door at the top of the stairs opens at the same time, and Jefferson stands on the threshold. He watches, face impassive, as Steve struggles out of the car, and then he disappears, leaving the door wide open.

Emma rolls her eyes with a huff and hovers at Steve's elbow as he hobbles up the steps. She mulls over what happened the last time she did this, but she has every confidence there won't be a repeat with either her or Steve. Jefferson knows she'd kick his ass.

She leaves Captain America at the door with her cell number, takes her hand out of her pocket long enough to give a short wave, and heads back to her car. Steve nods his thanks to her and steps inside.

He has a feeling this is going to be a very long night.

Wandering down the hall, Steve eventually comes to a living room with a fireplace, a white sectional sofa, and a grand piano. Jefferson sits backward on the piano stool, hunched so far over that his elbows are on his knees. He turns and looks up when Steve enters, expression unreadable.

"There's soup in the fridge," he says into the silence of the room, "and a room made up at the end of the hall, last door on the right."

Steve nods.

Jefferson stands and makes to move past Steve, stops just beside him and says, "I get that you want to go back, but I'm not going anywhere without Grace."

"I understand," Steve says. And he does. Until yesterday, he hadn't let the Winter Soldier out of his sight for more than 20 minutes at a time. Jefferson may have had his daughter back for longer than Steve had had Bucky around the Tower, but the fear of losing either one again was still fresh for both of them. His discussion with Henry earlier about time travel has balanced any urgency he had felt about continuing his rescue mission. That, and he can barely walk.

He sees Jefferson give a sharp nod out of the corner of his eye, and then the man is gone and Steve is alone in a strange house in another universe. He sets Henry's book down on the glass coffee table, picks up the comic, and lowers himself gingerly onto the couch. It's still mid-afternoon and he has a lot of reading to do. Wiping his hands on his borrowed pants, he gently eases the comic out of its plastic sheath and dives in.

**0o0o**

Steve doesn't see Jefferson again that night. He falls asleep on the couch sometime around sundown with Henry's fairy tale book on his lap.

He'd turned the pages at random until he came across the face he was looking for: Jefferson, dressed in the leather coat and eye makeup he'd had the first time Steve had seen him. He was handing a small globe to a man with glittering gold skin who was asking about a pair of ruby slippers in the caption. Lost, Steve had flipped back to the beginning of the chapter, surprised to see it titled "The Evil Queen." Two pages in, he had given up and started with the very first story, which happened to be a very odd and elaborate telling of _Snow White and the Seven Dwarves_.

Now, the book falls to the carpeted floor and Steve jerks awake, wincing at stiff muscles and smarting stitches. It takes him a moment to recognize the room, dark as it is. He maneuvers into standing, orients himself, and sets off in search of the kitchen. His mouth is dry and he desperately needs a glass of water.

A minute later, he counts one mission he's started this week a success. The kitchen is lit by a soft glow from above the stove, and Steve uses this to search the cupboards until he finds a glass. He fills it from the tap and leans against the sink to assess the room. Like the living room, it is far from crowded. Open and full of dark marble, it is clean and sterile in a way that suggests little use or obsessive cleanliness. Knowing Jefferson as little as he does, he can't tell which to lean to.

Steve sets the empty glass by the sink and makes his way back to the living room with a plan to continue reading Henry's book until the portal jumper wakes. Halfway there, he spies a set of stairs and curiosity gets the best of him. He wants to check out the balcony.

He grabs Henry's book from the living room and then, with more ease than he had getting up to the front door yesterday, climbs the steps to the second floor.

The first thing that strikes him, though not for the first time, is how quiet it is. All of Storybrooke is quiet, like so many small villages he and the Commandos had passed through in Europe following the warfront. There's no blaring horns, no heavy rumble of a thousand idling cars stuck in traffic, it's…quiet. He can hear birds chirping through some open window, and with the carpet muffling his footsteps, the loudest thing is his heart in his ears. Even the persistent ticking of the clock downstairs has faded. It's as disconcerting as it is peaceful.

Steve makes his way slowly down the corridor, examining the pictures on the walls and peeking into the rooms as he goes. The one closest to the stairs on the left is empty, probably used for storage. The one across from it contains piles and piles of assorted hats (an absolutely obsessive number of hats). The next door on the right he avoids; 'GRACE' spelled across it in painted wooden letters like a warning. Its opposite is an adult's room, the colour scheme the most subdued yet, all navy blues and wenge furniture. The bed looks untouched.

When he comes to the end of the hallway, he takes the only available path as it turns left. The first room on the right is empty but for a cricket set and some old newspaper bundles. The window is covered up with plastic sheeting.

Behind the only door on the left side of the hallway, he finally finds Jefferson. The man is passed out at a work table littered with all manner of sewing instruments and strange tools that Steve doesn't recognize, facing away from the door. His head rests on one folded arm, the other dangles a wicked set of shears over his feet. Steve is reminded of Tony, locking himself away in his lab until he drops. Steve recalls shadowed eyes and figures Jefferson needs the sleep as much as Iron Man. He leaves him be, and turns to the last door.

Finally, he meets a sun room with a big set of sliding doors that lead out to the balcony. There's a patio table set up in the centre of the room, and Steve snags one of the chairs to drag it outside.

The view is just as wonderful as he imagined. On the left and extending out in front of him is a lush forest, teeming with shades of green and carrying the heavy of scent of petrichor. The right side holds a distant view of quaint little Storybrooke, old houses and a clock tower leading out into a sunlit bay.

For a moment, Steve itches for his sketchbook.

"Lovely view, isn't it?"

He whirls around, tensed for a fight, the book a blunt weapon in his one available hand, and sees a man where there was only empty space before. Dressed in an expensive-looking grey suit and leaning on a cane, the older man is the picture of sophistication. It is an artist's eye for contour that allows Steve to make an educated guess that this is,

"Rumpelstiltskin."

The man dips his head, the pleased smile that twists his lips barely there.

"Captain," he returns. "Good to see you up and about. I trust you are enjoying your stay in our little town so far?"

Steve sets the book down on his commandeered patio chair, squints at the town against the rising sun. "Not my favourite vacation so far. I haven't seen much of the town but what I have is…nice."

Rumpelstiltskin chuckles, kneading the handle of his cane. He doesn't comment on the obvious compromise of that last statement.

"From what I've read," Steve says, angling to face the man head on, "you're not here for small talk."

"No, dearie, I am not. There is a business matter I would like to discuss with you."

The Dark One crosses the balcony, looking up at Steve but appearing no smaller for it. "The two dolls that I gave Jefferson…only one was paid for. You are free to decline, of course. After all, I am _s_ pringing this on you without warning. But that only gets you back to where you came from, no freebies or fly-bys. All magic comes with a price."

Steve nods. "I was kind of expecting that."

"Good. You've got some brains in that all-American head of yours."

Well-used to Tony's barbs, Steve resists rolling his eyes. "What do you want?"

"Nothing you'll miss, I assure you. Just a few hairs."

Steve squares his shoulders. "I could miss a few hairs, depending on what they're used for."

Rumpelstiltskin shakes his head, the tiny grin back on his stubbled face. "That's not the right question, dearie. The right question is: how many little golden strands do you think your friend is worth?"

A muscle works in Steve's jaw as he glowers down at the man a head shorter than him. He knows the insult is just to push him into agreeing but it works too well, fills acid into his veins just the same.

He runs a stiff hand through his hair, catches loose strands between his fingers. Rumpelstiltskin daintily twirls a hand of his own and a jar appears in his grasp, the wisps of Steve's hair already corked inside. He raises the phial like he's toasting a glass of champagne –

"Pleasure doing business with you, Captain. Enjoy your reading."

– and disappears in a cloud of purple.

Steve stares for a moment at the edge of the roof the man has just vacated before breathing deep, refilling his man-purse, and sitting down with Henry's fairy tales.

He figures he has a few days before he can go back and try the boy's strategy; he may as well do some homework on his temporary residence in the mean time.

He opens the book to "The Beauty and the Beast."


	7. With Inflation, a Buck For Your Thoughts

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now, Steve is a Bad Patient surviving on an experimental super-drug, do not follow his example.   
> Jefferson is worse and he's not even super-powered. Listen to your doctors, friends.

After the excitement of the morning, of making a deal with the Dark One, the day stretches long and quiet before him.

Steve discovers very quickly that Jefferson's house is very boring.

There is no lack of things to do – plenty of books, at least six different instruments not including the grand piano, and one room on the ground floor full of board and lawn games (all of which require more than one player). There are very few recreational electronics, but Steve grew up in the '20s, and though he's had Starkpads and SHIELD gadgets pushed at him for nearing three years, he isn't bothered all that much by their absence.

He finds a large sketch pad and several expensive artist kits of paint and colour pencils and markers in a cabinet.

It's difficult with one hand and the light breeze that keeps pulling at the corners of the paper, but he sits on the balcony and draws. He sketches the garden below him, the trees around him, the town, the bay. He adds as much detail as he can, drawing and redrawing, trying to keep his mind off the fact that he's stuck – stuck healing, stuck in another universe, stuck waiting for a mad thief and his daughter to open a portal and take him back in time.

Hurry, his mind tells him, and he scratches the pencil through several layers of paper.

Steve tears them off, balls them up, starts again.

When it gets dark, Steve ventures inside to change the bandages on his shoulder and abdomen. Whale had mentioned antibiotics and physiotherapy, Steve had declined both. The serum would prevent an infection just as well as any medication, and his newest gunshot wounds are close enough to the old ones that he is sure the exercises he'd learned then would apply here. Besides, he won't be in this world long enough to set up and attend an appointment with anyone.

Both wounds are healed enough on the outside to look like the freshest of scars, puckered and red in the harsh bathroom light. He runs gentle fingers over the stitches on his side; Steve knows from experience that the insides will take longer to mend, so he carefully runs a wet cloth around the injuries and then rewraps both wounds in clean bandages. He pulls the scrub top back on, grimacing at the feeling of an old, dirty shirt, and slips his arm back in its sling.

He heads for the kitchen to make dinner. Steve splits the soup from the fridge into two bowls, fixes twin sandwiches with some difficulty, and pulls out two trays. He searches the ground floor while the soup heats, searching for his host, but there's no sign of the Hatter around the house. Upstairs, the door to Jefferson's workroom is closed, and Steve's knocking goes unanswered. He leaves one of the trays outside Jefferson's door when the soup is done, and takes his own back to the living room.

He falls asleep on the couch, the last chapter of Once Upon a Time open on the glass coffee table.

0o0o

Jefferson has a problem.

Not his usual kind of problem. He knows who he is, and where and when and why.

It's an old problem, one he hasn't had in a long time.

Something is broken. Again. Finally.

All the little threads of sanity he had so carefully stitched for 28 years around the pieces of his psyche are…snapped. Memories and ideas and all manner of unpleasant feelings keep leaking out from the depths of his mind, and no matter how he tries he cannot push them back.

There had been something in the mirror. Something smoky purple and bounding, it had knocked him off balance and then disappeared back beyond the edges of the frame.

Wonderland had been waiting for him. Thorny yellow roses – paint them red! – had reached beyond the rippling glass and touched silky petals to the parts of his brain that told him home.

They had told him, come.

And he had listened.

But Grace had told him, let's go back.

And he had hesitated. Home was the Hat, the shack in the Enchanted Forest, the cottage in Tulgey Wood, the mansion in Storybrooke. Who and where and when and why!?

But he listened to Grace. Because even though he had called her Alice, she was his and she was there and he would not be separated from her ever again.

And Wonderland – that ghastly, greedy, gluttonous place – did not take kindly to his refusal. If Wonderland could not entice, it would entrap. Tansy vines had shredded as the portal tore him away.

And just like the last time magic had so unceremoniously dragged him away from There and thrown him Here, Jefferson is left to pick up the pieces of his mind and sort the deck into some sort of order. He had pulled together for a brief moment to listen to Archie – and the cricket made sense talking about flashbacks and encoded memories and triggers – but now he is alone and alone is not good.

He makes a hat. Files one memory for each snip and fold and stitch. It is the longest he has spent on a single hat since the first one he made at the Red Queen's demand, testing out supplies and dusting old knowledge.

Get it to work, the Hatter blubbers.

Jefferson tears the strip of fabric out and starts the whole brim over, expression stoic, hands shaking.

0o0o

Monday morning dawns gloomy and grey, and when Steve looks the ground is wet with early rain.

It's been two days since he was shot. Two days since he failed to rescue Bucky from the past. Two and a half days since he left the Winter Soldier in the Tower. A day since he last saw Jefferson.

Steve checks his bandages again and works for some time on the physio exercises. His range of motion is mostly returned in his shoulder, so he leaves the sling folded on the couch and heads for the bathroom.

After brushing his teeth with a fresh toothbrush dug up from the depths of the cupboard under the sink, Steve pokes around the house in search of a clean outfit so he can shower. He discovers three things very quickly.

One, Jefferson isn't taking any visitors. Steve's knocks on the workroom door go unanswered, and the tray from yesterday sits untouched by the door. Steve hopes the portal jumper isn't dead. He needs him to go get Bucky and go home.

Two, Jefferson owns a lot of clothes, and all of the clothes Jefferson owns are expensive. Not Stark expensive, but definitely of a higher quality than Steve can afford. Most of what he finds is heavily patterned dress shirts and vests in muted tones, though there is the occasional splash of colour. The rest of it is pants, jeans, and jackets all in shades of black and grey, neck ties, socks, and undergarments.

Sifting through the hangers, Steve discovers: Three, everything is tailored. Not a single garment has not been fitted to Jefferson's skinny frame. Steve's shoulders are several inches wider than the portal jumper's. The jeans however…

One careful shower and a change of legwear later, Steve finds himself staring at the empty living room and an indeterminate amount of free time.

Or, he reasons, nine hours of free time (any longer and he might just bust the workroom door open and drag the Hatter to the portal himself). It's Monday, so Grace will be in school until midafternoon, and Jefferson had made it clear he isn't going anywhere without his daughter.

Nine hours. He can do nine hours.

Steve lasts 23 minutes before he finds himself aimlessly wandering between rooms, stretching his shoulder and ruminating on the plan he and Henry had worked out at the hospital. He needs to move.

He needs to get out of this house, needs to find Bucky.

Jefferson's house is suffocating, smothering him. Something about it feels off today. The air doesn't move, the windows won't open. It feels like the walls are pressing in and holding tight at the corners to keep him inside. The carpet pulls at his feet, conspires with the ceiling to drag him down and keep him there.

Steve needs to get out, so he puts on his boots and goes for a walk, heads to town wearing borrowed black jeans and a two-day-old scrub shirt. He plans his route by the clocktower, easily the tallest building in Storybrooke. He'll aim there and then continue down the street to the waterfront. Let the waves and the sea breeze distract him.

The scent of pine, as heavy in the air as the humidity, follows him down the hill, under the canopy of dew-sprinkled branches. Months of old, browning needles crunch underfoot and birds twitter unseen above and around him. Steve, not for the first time, wishes he was here under better circumstances.

Entering the town proper, he is struck again by how unassuming the fairytale enclave looks. The streets are laid out in a wide grid, broad enough on either side to suggest any original design included horse-drawn carriages. The shops are small things – not a chain store in sight – boasting antique furniture, homemade necessities and knick-knacks, and a few food joints. There are quaint old buildings sprinkled through with newer homes and renovated fronts. There is nothing to suggest that Storybrooke's entire population consists of illegal immigrants from another dimension.

Regrettably, the strangest thing he sees is a short man with a pickaxe walking hand-in-hand with a nun wearing a sparkling blue habit. It's odd, but it's not New York odd, not Avengers odd. He recognizes them from Henry's book.

Steve reluctantly accepts that Storybrooke is, on the surface, identical to every other small town in In-the-Middle-of-Nowhere, USA.

He looks up, checks his proximity to the clocktower, and is surprised to see it's much closer than he realized. The quay and the white-capping waves beyond it are only a few blocks farther.

One block more, however, and Steve stumbles.

Something wrenches at his brain, an intangible force slamming his head with a Quinjet. His stomach flips. His limbs lock in shock, then abruptly loosen without his approval. He loses his footing on the curb and trips to his good knee in the road. Images he's not seeing with his eyes block out the dirty asphalt digging into his palm.

He sees forest, a long road curving to the right.

A green sign, 'Leaving Storybrooke.'

Rumpelstiltskin in a brown shawl, pulling him forward.

Shimmering purple.

As quickly as it came, the pressure lifts and the images fade. Steve blinks. His knee twinges against the pebbly blacktop of Main St, and a Massachusetts license plate stares him in the face. His head throbs with echoes of whatever that was.

He has no idea what just happened. Seeing things that aren't there is not something he has a lot of experience with. He's had lucid dreams before – nightmares he can't wake from and half-memories called up between sleep and awareness – but this was different. He was fully awake, and the vision was sudden and painful. If Thor was here, Steve could ask him; visions are not entirely unusual on Asgard, according to the warrior prince.

"Hey, are you alright?"

Steve braces himself on the bumper of a yellow Volkswagen Beetle and pushes to his feet. He sees, standing in the street and staring at him, a young woman in a loose, black vest, her brows raised in concern. A Dalmatian dog is pressed against her leg, quietly watching.

"Yeah," Steve grits out. "I'm fine."

The hand with the leash goes to her hip. "You sure? 'Cause you just tried to shine that bumper with your face," she says, pointing with her free hand.

Steve forces a laugh through the pounding behind his eyes, "Yeah, I…misjudged the curb. I wasn't really watching where I was going."

The woman eyes him for a moment, sharp gaze assessing, taking in the old shirt, borrowed jeans, and specks of blood on his combat boots. Finally, she steps forward and extends her hand. "Red. I haven't seen you around before…?"

"Steve," he says. And then, because he knows he's talking to a werewolf, adds, "Rogers." He silently pleads with her to take the bait. He doesn't want to talk to a stranger about how he's feeling or what happened. He doesn't even know what happened.

To his relief, Red smiles. "Captain America! Yeah, I heard Henry talking to Emma about you being real. What are you doing in Storybrooke?"

"Uh, it's a long story. The short version is: I got shot and fell through a portal. I'm just sightseeing until I can catch a ride back home."

"Well, that explains the blood," Red breathes. "Glad to know you're not a crazed murderer. Um, would you like to join us for a walk? Pongo and I were just heading down to the docks. We're trying to take our minds off…" The smile fades as she gestures to the building across the street from her.

Steve risks a look behind him. He sees nothing immediately interesting or worth distracting from about the building: tall, brick, a joint complex with the business next door, The Storybrooke Bakery. A gold sign on the door marks it as the practice of one Dr. Archibald Hopper, Psychiatrist. As he's turning back, Steve realizes that, parked behind the Beetle and sandwiching him in, is a brown police cruiser.

He doesn't need to be 'the greatest strategist in the Marvel universe' to know that something really bad happened in that building very recently, possibly that morning. He doesn't ask Red about it. Not because he doesn't care, but because it opens her up to ask about him, and it is plainly obvious to both parties that each of them is trying to avoid discussing their feelings.

Instead, Steve grins and says, "I'd like that. Thank you."

He sees no reason to decline. He was headed to the water himself, looking for a distraction in the walk and the waves just as they were. Besides, it would be awkward to decline only for both parties to end up walking in the same direction to the same place anyway.

Red's smile is more genuine this time, and Steve can't help it as his lips stretch to return it. He lets Pongo sniff his boots and his hand, and then the dog ducks away and heads off down the street. Steve and Red trail behind him.

"Hey," Red says. "Let's stop by Storybrooke Ice Cream on the way. I'd kill for some lemon shaved ice right now."

Steve only shrugs.

0o0o

It's just starting to rain when Steve walks back through the front door of the mansion on the hill. He'd had to run to beat the first cold drops as they started leaking from dark clouds, and was pleased to find that not only had he made it, but his side was barely twinging in protest.

The beach had been enjoyable (at least, as enjoyable as anything else had been since he had woken up 70 years away from everyone and everything he had known). The quiet, steady rushing of the waves and the light, mindless conversation with Red had been an effective distraction from his current situation. He could truthfully admit he felt relaxed (or, as relaxed as he had ever managed since learning the identity of the Winter Soldier).

His newfound peace of mind, however, doesn't last much longer than it takes him to notice the Hatter is out of his room.

Jefferson is seated at the end of the sectional sofa farthest from the doorway, leaning back into the plush cushions, and cradling a cup of tea on a saucer in his lap. There's an entire service laid out on the table, two teapots, a second cup, cream, and sugar. The Hatter's head is slumped forward, and his eyes are closed, the dark circles under them more pronounced than ever. His hair is gelled up, his clothes are changed, and a dark green scarf sits around his neck.

Without the pinch of stress to his face, Steve can see Bucky – before the war, before the Soldier.

All the anger and resentment comes flooding in, sliding cold up the back of his neck, and shooting acid down to his hands. He makes a conscious effort to remain physically relaxed, to hold his hands loose and not ball them into fists like his brain is telling him.

There are three and half hours left until Grace is out of school. In four, maybe five hours, he will never have to look at Jefferson ever again. It's a therapeutic notion.

Steve turns about-face, thinks of the sun room and the sketchbook he left there. He can survive three and a half hours, as long as he's not in the same room as Jefferson.

"You feel like magic," comes a groggy voice from behind him.

Steve pauses, still two steps into the living room.

"What do you mean?"

There's no reason he would feel like magic, not unless the Hat leaves traces. But the portal jumper shouldn't find that worth commenting on. Steve knows from reading Henry's book that he's had the Hat for decades. When he considers what else could be responsible only one thing comes to mind.

He turns around. Jefferson has one eye half open, lazily following his movements as Steve shifts his weight.

"Something weird happened," Steve admits after a long moment of wondering how much he cares about getting an answer. "I had a... vision when I was in town this morning. I saw a road leading out of Storybrooke, and Rumpelstiltskin pulled me over a spray-painted line on the pavement."

"'Mr Gold' has been packing for a long trip," the portal jumper says. He picks up the little spoon on the saucer he's holding and gives his tea a quick stir, a slow sip. "No one can cross the town boundary without reactivating their curse. But you were never cursed."

"So he used me as a shield?" Steve asks, running a hand through his hair and worrying at a loose strand he finds. He's aware of the irony in Gold's plan. He's not amused.

"...Are those my pants?"

The sudden turn in conversation catches him off guard, and he glances down. He pats absently at the black jeans, brushing a small rain of sand onto the carpet.

"Yes," he says.

"D'you want me to fix your, uh...outfit?"

He does not. He's had enough of questionable deals and magic debts; there is no way he's asking a favour from the Hatter.

"No."

Jefferson's lips quirk up a fraction of an inch as his eyes slip closed again. "Suit yourself," he says.

Steve scowls, and walks out of the living room.

0o0o

Three hours later, the clouds break open and rain drizzles down, pittering on the roof and misting at the windows. Three hours later, Steve has a detailed sketch of Ruby and Pongo on the beach, shaded in with the broken crayons he'd found at the bottom of the artist's kit. He signs it along with the sleeve of Henry's comic book.

Four hours later, Steve packs up the art supplies, places the comic, sketch, and storybook into a neat pile, pushes his chair in, and takes a last look out at the surrounding forest.

This is it. Grace should be downstairs or arriving shortly. He's got a plan. The realm jumper is waiting to open a portal. His wounds are as healed as his impatience can stand.

This is it.

It's not his last chance (he will drag Jefferson's sorry ass through the Hat as many times as it takes, and damn Gold's 'price'), but it is the last chance he needs to complete his mission. It will be. He's sure of it. One way or the other, he is going to be with his best friend tonight.

When he walks into the living room, Grace is sitting with her father, waving around an empty teacup as she gleefully tells him the events of her day. Her backpack, lying against the coffee table, is stained dark with rain.

She pauses for breath and reaches for one of the pots on the tray still on the coffee table; Jefferson slaps a hand to it first, slides it away with an unpleasant scraping of ceramic on glass.

"Not that one," he says, and turns the tray around so the other pot is closer to her.

While Grace fixes her cup, Jefferson looks up and finally acknowledges the soldier in his doorway.

"I have your gear," he says, nodding to a half-open duffle bag sitting on the piano bench. Steve can see his shield poking out of the top. He crosses the room and unzips the flap the rest of the way. His harness, gloves, and boots are all inside as expected. What he surprises him is that his uniform is tucked neatly under everything else, mercifully blood-free. When he shuffles it out and unfolds it, he finds poorly concealed patches sewed tightly over all three bullet holes and the once-gaping chasm where the nurses had cut through to get access to the wounds.

His thanks, when he expresses it, is genuine but not powerful enough that he feels like changing. He slips the uniform over Jefferson's jeans and Whale's lost-and-found scrub shirt, then turns back to the couch.

"Hi," Grace says, smiling.

"Hi," Steve returns, not smiling.

"You ready?" Jefferson asks. He's not smiling either, and he's lost all colour in his cheeks. His grip on the Hat is threatening to scrunch the brim.

Steve squares his shoulders and hefts his shield.

He's ready.

It's time for his second chance.

"Let's go."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There goes my 'every other chapter in the other universe' thing :(
> 
> Everyone knows what episode we're dancing around, right? It's been so many years and I still haven't finished season 2...


End file.
